Defenders of the Altverse, Ep 01: Hitchhiker's Map
by MegaBadBunny
Summary: After "Journey's End", Rose and the Tenth Doctor duplicate have some things to sort out. But first, they need to solve the mystery behind the invisible threat that's killing off Torchwood staff one by one. The first story in the ongoing "Defenders of the Altverse" series, depicting a season's-worth of adventures with Rose and Tentoo like we never got to see on telly.
1. Chapter 1

_Just like that, it's gone._

_The TARDIS disappears, leaving no traces of its presence behind. The wet sand previously beneath it is smooth and undisturbed. Impressionless. It betrays nothing._

_She stares at the empty space, silent and disbelieving. She'd been so wrapped up in the moment, she hadn't even noticed him walk away, hadn't heard it start to take off, not until it was too late. She ran forward to try to stop it somehow, but of course she couldn't. The TARDIS faded away right before her eyes._

_This was the plan all along, she realizes numbly. To leave her here. Again._

_He didn't even say goodbye this time._

_A noise beside her. Someone is standing there. She briefly glances at him when he takes her hand in his. But she can't take the sight of him for very long. _

You're not real_, she says, or maybe she just thinks it._

_She lowers her eyes and gazes at nothingness instead._

"_So," he says softly after a moment, "What's next?"_

* * *

Rose pressed her forehead against the cool window of the company SUV, watching the beach and then the countryside zoom lazily by, feeling tired and a little sick and more than a little sorry for herself. When she was younger, the rumble of a bus on the road or a train on the tracks would lull her to sleep, but she had no such luck now, no matter how tired she may feel.

She could hear her mum chatting at the Doctor, or the man who said he was the Doctor, or the new Doctor, or the half-Doctor, or whatever he was. He was putting up with Jackie good-naturedly. It would have made Rose smile if he had been the other Doctor. The real Doctor, she couldn't help but think.

She closed her eyes and tried to block out the sound of his voice. Right now, more than anything, she wished she could just curl up into a lump and die, as silly and melodramatic as it she knew it sounded. Every word he spoke was like a stabbing pain in her ears, a reminder of the almost-was.

Rose could still taste him on her lips, the not-quite-Doctor. Fleshy and sweet and surprisingly human, and just a tiny bit salty from the ocean spray on the wind. She wasn't going to lie, not even to herself: it was a nice kiss. Very nice. She would know. She'd done her fair share of kissing over the years. She was, in fact, something of a kissing expert. And their snog had hit all the right notes, made her heart flutter and her chest warm and little heavenly choirs erupt in the back of her head.

At least, until she had heard the TARDIS leave.

It would have been so completely, utterly typical of him to let that happen. Let her kiss him as a distraction. Maybe he was more like the real Doctor than she thought.

In as small a movement as possible, she gently ran her thumb over her bottom lip, brushing away all traces of him. If Mickey were in the car, he would have teased her about sending mixed signals, would have made a joke about how now the Doctor knew how he felt.

If Mickey were in the car.

She winced when the car went over a bump, painfully reminding her of bruises and aches sustained over the last few days. She felt someone touch her hand, and knew it was him, the not-Doctor.

"You all right?" he asked quietly under the sound of Jackie's nonstop jabbering.

Rose nodded. She resisted the compulsion to pull her hand away. Whoever or whatever he was, she didn't have the energy to deal with his hurt feelings.

How odd it would have been to ride in a car again with the actual Doctor, she thought to herself with an almost-smile. How pedestrian. Or maybe not pedestrian, since a car was involved. She realized she didn't entirely know what the phrase meant.

"So why's there two of you, again?" Jackie asked from the front seat. The new Doctor dropped Rose's hand before Jackie could see them touching. "Are you a clone or what?"

"Biological metacrisis," he responded. "When that Dalek hit me, or when he hit the other me I should say, I started to regenerate. Didn't want to give up this body so soon—can you blame me?—so I sort of kept what energy I needed to heal myself, and leaked out the remaining energy into a biological vessel, and that was this hand, and now it's me in a new body, growth sped up a billion times by the rapid cell duplication. Brilliant regeneration theory, if I do say so myself. And I do say so."

He flashed a grin.

Jackie stared at him. "So…are you a clone or what?" she repeated.

His shoulders slumped just a little bit. "I grew out of a hand," he offered.

"Well it's not the worst place a fellow could come from, I s'pose," Jackie mused. "I've been with blokes from all over, mind you don't tell Pete that. Men's egos are such fragile things. No offense, Doctor."

"None taken."

"However it happened, I've just got to say I'm actually glad you're stuck here, maybe keep this one at home for a while." She nodded toward Rose, who closed her eyes again and fervently wished for this conversation to stop.

"You know she was just going to up and leave me here? Alone?" Jackie continued.

"You wouldn't be alone, you'd have Pete and Tony," Rose said, watching the asphalt fly by the car in a flurry of black-and-white.

"I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to the Doctor," Jackie quipped. She turned back to him. "Thirty-six hours I was in labor with her, and here she's going to leave me for some chap she honestly barely knows from Adam. No offense, Doctor."

"None taken," he said, though Rose could tell by his smirk that he was thinking of a different kind of Adam, one with a tendency to faint and a strange little window in his head.

"She was just going to go running back to that man and leave everything here behind," Jackie said. "We have a life here, you know. A proper life. With mansions and cars and things. We don't even have to work now, you know that?"

She paused for a moment, contemplating. "I should have realized it was fishy when she got that job at Torchwood or what d'you call it."

"Still working at Torchwood, then?" the Doctor asked Rose.

"Yeah," she responded, fixing her gaze on the back of the seat in front of her. "Guess I am."

"She only took the job to get what she needed so she could find you and leave me behind," Jackie said. Rose could feel the Doctor shift uncomfortably in his seat in response. "Her poor old mum," Jackie continued, throwing a reproachful gaze back at her daughter.

"God, mum. Please stop."

Jackie sniffed. "I'm just making conversation, sweetheart. Lord knows you're making a right mess of it at the mo. Look at you, all that work and now you won't even give him the time of day! What's gotten into you? Your precious bleeding Doctor's right here!"

She looked back at him sharply. "No offense, Doctor."

"None taken. Been called much worse."

"You're not the Doctor," Rose blurted out.

There was a pause. "Not much worse than that," the Doctor said after a moment.

"What are you on about? Of course that's who he is!" Jackie said, reaching back to smack her daughter on the shoulder. "Look, he looks just like him and everything!"

"I know what he looks like. But he's not him," Rose insisted.

She glanced over at the Doctor, whose expression was inscrutable. "Sorry, you're just not," she finished.

"I am, though," he responded. "Just in a different body. A new body. A new new body. New new Doctor," he said, an encouraging smile on his face.

Rose looked away.

"Rose, we went through this before, last time I changed."

"This is different."

"How?"

"It just is," Rose insisted, not looking at him. She could feel him watching her though.

"Rose—"

Her mobile chose that moment to start ringing, its obnoxious pop-song ringtone slicing through the air. Rose heaved a heavy sigh and answered it, secretly grateful for the interruption.

"Agent Tyler," she said with a sigh.

"Where the bloody hell have you been?" her boss barked on the other end. "I've been ringing you for days. DAYS. Do you know what day it is?"

"No," she said honestly. She'd lost track.

"Today is the day I fire your arse if you don't get in here right now!"

Rose sighed again. "I'm kind of in Norway right now."

The other end went silent. Then, perplexed, "Why the bloody hell are you in Norway?"

"It's a long story."

"Well you'd better tell it to me when you get here, then. I want you straight here, you understand? You and Mickey. No excuses. Got it?"

"Got it," Rose affirmed, unable to muster anything resembling enthusiasm. She suspected that this wasn't a good time to tell him about Mickey. "See you first thing when I get back."

She hung up to see her mother staring at her, fuming.

"God, what now?" Rose asked.

"You are not running back to that institution the moment you get back," Jackie lectured. "You need a proper night's sleep, you do, and a good meal. And a shower, I'd wager."

Rose shrugged. "I've got to go, it's work."

She chanced a look at the not-Doctor, who was still eying her with concern. She quickly looked away. "Besides, I can sleep in the car."

Jackie scowled at her. She shrugged and turned back around in her seat. "All right, sweetheart, if that's what you want," she said, resigned.

No, Rose thought as she settled back, leaned against the window, and closed her eyes. No, it wasn't what she wanted. She didn't want to go to Torchwood, she didn't want to be sitting in a stupid company car with someone who most definitely was not the Doctor, she didn't even want to be in this universe.

What a waste of so much hard work. What a waste of so much working and waiting and hoping.

Rose felt herself slowly drifting off into the comforting darkness of sleep. Maybe she was lucky. Maybe this was just a nightmare and she'd wake up in the TARDIS any moment now, and there he would be, and even if Donna was there, or Martha, it would be all right, everything would be fine, as long as she was in the TARDIS with him. Maybe this was all just a bad dream.

* * *

"Oh, that feels good," the Doctor said, letting out a groan as he stretched. Cars were rubbish things, he decided. Maybe more comfortable than what he'd used in his time at UNIT, but why did they have to be so slow? Normal, subjectively linear time just snailed on so. So. Slowly.

This was going to take some getting used to.

He wriggled his toes and arched his back and stuck his hands in his pockets and felt very glad to be outside, indeed. Not only was his tall and fidgety self cramped in both the car and the boat ride, but it had been rather awkward sitting there while Rose alternated between sleeping and pretending to sleep and Jackie chatted up the drivers and captain. He suspected those drivers might be putting in for an early retirement after their quality Jackie time.

Himself, he'd found uncustomarily quiet, hoping not to bother Rose. Instead, he'd spent the time familiarizing himself with this new body, since he hadn't had a proper chance to do so before.

Hands? Two. Feet? Check. Toes? Normal. Hair? Great hair.

Still wasn't a ginger though, you'd think if he'd absorbed some Donna, he'd at least get the benefit of some ginger-genes. But then, that was to be expected since he was, for all intents and purposes, a replica.

He winced at that.

During the boat trip, he'd occupied himself by feeling out his new insides, turning his attention inward to see what had changed. His circulatory system was different, what with the one heart. The single heart was an odd sensation indeed, very odd. He hadn't liked the one heartbeat very much back in Shakespeare's age and he wasn't sure he liked it now. He felt sort of empty without the other heart, but sensed that some other human bits had taken up too much room for it, some strange organs he hadn't needed before. Tonsils and gallbladder and appendix, really, what was all that about? He reminded himself to get the appendix removed as soon as possible, nasty thing.

But the heart. He was very, very aware of it, especially when Rose was near, odd enough. That was new. Rose had always captured his attention with alarming ease, but this was different, his (one, lonely) heart hammer-hammer-hammering roughly against his ribs, a small bird desperate and fluttering to escape its cage. His heart rate had dramatically increased when she placed her hand on his chest, and it had skyrocketed when she pulled him in for a kiss. (During the kiss, and for a few moments after, he wasn't sure what his heart was doing, because his mind went strangely blank, and he had trouble focusing on anything but the feel of Rose's arms around his neck and her lips on his.) He hadn't really experienced that particular sensation before, not when he wasn't exerting himself or running from danger, anyway. He wasn't entirely certain what it was about. Perhaps this human body was faulty somehow.

Or perhaps it had something to do with the radical change in his body chemistry. Strange new hormones and pheromones and other bizarre human things that didn't quite make sense yet.

Speaking of Rose.

She got out of the car after him, tired and bleary-eyed. She had changed clothes and shoes during the boat ride, pulled on a button-down top and a skinny-pants-and-jacket suit set and flimsy little ballet flats, a professional ensemble for her professional job at Torchwood. It didn't suit her, no, the colors didn't suit her at all, they were far too dull with their grey and their white, but the Doctor knew better than to criticize her fashion choices even when he and Rose were on the best of terms, lest his words be answered with a searing glare.

Rose and Jackie exchanged hugs, Jackie gave him a hug whether he wanted it or not (he didn't), and she got back in the car.

Now it was just him and Rose, alone for the first time in…well, years.

It was decidedly awkward.

Despite the kerfuffle earlier, he decided to remain upbeat for her sake. They'd been through this before, the last time he regenerated, and no, this wasn't any different.

Well, aside from the obvious differences.

He just needed to be a little patient, although that was something he'd never been good at, not really. He suspected he would have an even worse time of it in this new body with this new brain that randomly and often exuded hints of Donna, not to mention strange hormonal imbalances whenever Rose was in close proximity (perhaps something he should get checked out, he mused, though it made a sort of sense—regeneration, even a half-arsed semi-regeneration, always resulted in an explosion of fresh nerve endings that sent signals shocking throughout his frame at even the lightest whisper of wind in his hair or cloth on his skin, never mind the small explosions that erupted in his skull when Rose's fingers laced between his or when she grabbed him for that short-lived but glorious kiss, and suddenly he found himself lost in a whole other world of thought yet again).

And chocolate. An intense desire for chocolate was also particularly prevalent in this new human brain.

But soon enough, he and Rose would bounce back to normal, he thought with confidence—they'd ounce off into the blue, or the sunset, or the nearest place with chips. Or chocolate. Or jelly babies. Blimey, he was hungry.

"So this is Canary Wharf on the other side?" he asked, looking up at the zeppelins drifting lazily over the skyscrapers in what he'd deemed Other London. He shielded his eyes from the sun as it set over the horizon—had it always hurt his eyes like that? He couldn't help but feel like Batman on kryptonite. Or was that Superman? Or Wonder Woman? Had to be Batman. He liked Batman. All dark and broody and too smart for his own good.

Rose was staring at him.

"What?" he said, suddenly aware he had no idea what she'd just said.

"I just said 'Yeah'," she responded, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets.

They both stood for a moment. Rose avoided his gaze.

"Yeah well, looks about the same, doesn't it?" the Doctor added. "Same old Torchwood, same old world. Nearly."

"Hmm," Rose said noncommittally.

The Doctor found himself suddenly hating her pantsuit. He didn't care if the hatred was irrational, the suit was just wrong. Too stiff and boring and dull for Rose. He missed the bright pinks and vivid purples and joyful blues.

Stupid business clothes.

"So, we going in or what?" he asked.

Rose raised an eyebrow at him. "You're not coming with me?" she asked, or more accurately, stated.

"Well, the car is gone, so…aren't I?" He hadn't planned for this. What else was he supposed to do? Discover more new squishy human body parts? Play squishy human body part Bingo?

Rose hesitated, sighed. "Sure, whatever," she said, resigned. "Do what you like. Just don't…"

The Doctor grinned. "Wander off?" he finished.

He thought he saw the hint of a smile creep into her eyes. "Rule number one," he said, grinning at her hopefully. She allowed herself to smile a bit more.

"Was that a smile?" he teased.

"Shut up," she muttered, her small smile vanishing as they walked toward the building.

"Never. So what do we do first? File a report? Do some paperwork? 'Stopped the end of the universe again, requesting reimbursement for petrol', that sort of thing?"

Rose grimaced. "No. First I deal with my boss."


	2. Chapter 2

"What do you mean, Smith decided to stay in the other universe? Who does that? Who in the bloody hell just up and does something like that?"

Oliver looked nearly purple with rage, pacing behind his fancy glasstop desk in his pristine white office. Rose started to respond, but he didn't give her the chance.

"And who is this fellow, anyway? How did he even get in here?" Oliver shouted over the sound of caretakers vacuuming out in the hall. He pointed at the Doctor.

The Doctor flashed his most charming smile. "I'm the Doctor," he said. "And I got in here with this." He flashed a psychic paper, something he must have pilfered on his way out of the other universe. Its little leather binding was blue instead of black—it wasn't quite the same as the other psychic paper, Rose couldn't help but notice.

"They don't fall for that here," she muttered to him. "They've all had a basic psychic training."

"Really?" the Doctor said, fascinated. "Who taught them that?"

Rose suddenly found her shoes very interesting, shuffled them a bit against the squeaky-clean floor. "Me," she admitted.

"Oh, brilliant," the Doctor beamed. "You should probably update your scanners, though. Your computer probably thinks I'm the Lord Constable or something."

Oliver glared at the Doctor, then back at Rose. "Who is this idiot, and why is he here?" he asked. "Is this that fellow you used to prattle on about all the time?"

Rose could practically hear the Doctor grin at that. "Yes, this is the Doctor," she said.

She looked the Doctor up and down. "Sort of."

"Sort of?" Oliver questioned. The Doctor deflated a bit.

"It's…complicated."

"It was a metacrisis event—" the Doctor started, but a sharp glance from Rose shut him up.

"Right," Oliver said, breathing loudly through his nostrils. The heavy breeze set his salt-and-pepper moustache hairs twitching frantically against his dark skin. "So you've just been hijacking Dimension Cannons, jumping universes, screwing with timelines, losing valuable agents, and running around with this—this—'sort of the Doctor', then?"

"There's only the one Dimension Cannon," Rose pointed out dully.

"And you requisitioned a company car from the Norway branch, without authorization," Oliver huffed, as if this was the most egregious error of all.

Rose's brow furrowed. "I don't need authorization for that, I'm an agent," she said, confused.

Oliver shook his head. "You need authorization to take a company car when your mother is involved."

"Quite right," the Doctor smirked.

"You can wipe that smile right off your mug, mate," Oliver told him, pointing a stern finger his way. The Doctor complied, but Rose could tell he was struggling not to laugh.

"And Smith—Mickey—you're telling me he just decided to stay?" Oliver asked Rose, his eyes still fixed on the Doctor.

"His gran died. Didn't have anything left for him here. It was his choice," Rose said, tired.

She didn't want to think about Mickey. She hadn't known he was planning to leave. He'd never mentioned it. Now she was never going to see him again…again.

She pushed it to the back of her mind, along with the hundreds of other bothersome and unpleasant things she'd already crowded back there.

Oliver sighed. He loosened the tie peeking out from his suit jacket and ran one hand over his receding hairline, dark fingers over dark skin and lightening hair. Rose imagined he probably blamed her for at least some of that hair loss. He wasn't wrong. He looked up at her, rubbing the back of his head; his eyes were weary.

"I'm going to have to let you go, Tyler," he said with a shrug.

Rose didn't say anything.

"It's nothing personal," he told her. "I don't want to do it. I like you well enough. You're smart, Tyler. And focused. Got a good work ethic. And I don't want to piss off Pete. But his contributions can't make up for your problems anymore."

He took in a breath, weighing his next words before dropping them. "You've become a liability," he said.

"Now hang on," the Doctor said, bristling a bit on Rose's behalf.

"No, it's okay," Rose told him.

"You're lucky to have her here," the Doctor plowed on ahead.

"No, it's really okay," Rose insisted, massaging her temple tiredly, but he wasn't listening.

"She probably knows more about time and space and dimension than everyone else here combined," the Doctor finished.

"That she does, and she's also broken more rules, had more trips to hospital, and racked up higher damages than everyone else here combined," Oliver responded coolly.

"Oh," the Doctor said, nonplussed. Then, "How much in damages?"

"About £73 million."

The Doctor couldn't help but be impressed. "Good job, you!" he said enthusiastically to Rose. Then upon seeing the look on her face, "Or, no, that's very bad, isn't it?"

"The fact is, this is just the last straw," Oliver said to Rose, ignoring the Doctor. "Janice put up with your nonsense because you were doing brilliant work on the Dimension Cannon, and nobody could do it quite like you. But you hacked the Cannon, Tyler. You used company property without permission," he said, tallying her grievances on his fingers, "you made several unscheduled and unverified jumps, you blatantly disregarded all of our safety procedures, and you've lost one of our best agents in the process. With your previous record here, that's just too much. Even Pete can't persuade Janice to keep you on."

"Don't suppose it matters that she helped save the universe and everything," the Doctor muttered under his breath, and Oliver ignored him.

"S'all right," Rose shrugged, apathetic. "It's about what I expected."

Oliver shook his head. "I don't know what you expected," he said. "All I can say is, I hope this bloke here is worth it."

He nodded toward the Doctor, who seemed like he was feeling uncomfortable again.

"I'm sorry, Rose, but after the debriefing, I'm going to have to ask you to pack up your things," Oliver told her.

Rose nodded. It wasn't as if she had anything to say.

"Are you going to be all right?" Oliver asked, a note of genuine concern threaded in his voice.

"No," Rose replied. "But then, that's not really any different from usual, so."

She could tell that worried the sort-of Doctor a bit. She didn't really care.

Oliver sat down behind his desk with a sigh. "I think I'll miss you, Tyler," Oliver told her. "Tell Pete I said hi, if you would. And I'm sorry."

Rose nodded again, looked around Oliver's office one last time, and walked out. The Doctor followed.

"Well he's a piece of work, isn't he?" the Doctor said, hands in pockets as they walked down the hall.

"He's really not so bad, most of the time," Rose said. "Anyway, he's right. I can't get anything right. I'm a liability. I'm just a screw-up."

"Now hold on," the Doctor interrupted. "You know that's not true."

"Isn't it?" Rose asked dully.

"You got the Dimension Cannon working. Not just anybody could do that, even with the rifts between the universes. Not even me."

Rose sighed. "Yeah, fat lot of good that did."

The Doctor stopped walking then. Rose turned back to look at him.

"What?" she asked, a little more grumpily than she'd intended.

"Well, it helped to save the universe—a lot of universes, actually—so I'd call that a fat lot of good," the Doctor said. He stepped closer to her. "What's gotten into you? You're different than I remember. The old Rose Tyler wouldn't let something like this get her down."

Rose bit back the temptation to tell him that he didn't remember anything, that he was technically only a day old. That six years was a lot of time for someone to change.

Instead she took a small step back, restoring the space between them.

"It's just been a hectic couple of days, is all," she said. _More like a bad couple of years_, she thought. "Besides, I never thought I'd have to deal with any of this. It's not like I planned on coming back here."

The air was silent for a moment as the Doctor let that soak in. "You think you came back empty-handed," he said flatly.

"I shouldn't have come back at all," Rose insisted. "I'm supposed to be in the other universe, right now, with him."

The Doctor stared at her. "Rose, I _am_ him," he responded, looking just a little bit hurt.

Rose was surprised that he let the hurt show—she could count, on one hand probably, the number of times a personal conversation had gotten this far. She half-expected him to storm off, but no, he just stood there, looking like a kicked puppy.

Guilt tugged at the corners of her mind. She tried to let the frustration out of her voice before she spoke to him again, averting her gaze.

"Look, I can't have this talk right now," she said to the wall behind him. "I've got to get to my debriefing before they leave for the night. Just..."

She gestured limply. "…I don't know, do what you like. There's a cafeteria downstairs if you're hungry, they'll be open for another couple minutes."

The Doctor nodded, uncharacteristically silent. Rose thought about reaching out to touch him, maybe squeeze his hand, something to ease that sad-puppy-dog look off his face, but it didn't feel right.

She couldn't force herself to forget the real Doctor. Not so soon.

So she turned around and continued walking down the hallway, toward the lift, to the last debriefing she would probably ever have at Torchwood.

The Doctor just stood and watched her go.

* * *

"'Scuse me, sweetheart? I said, did you want anything before I close up shop?"

The Doctor pulled out of his reverie, redirecting his gaze from the plastic-wrapped food behind the counter. He blinked in the harsh fluorescent lights. A nice young red-haired dinner lady was looking up at him from behind the food counter, smiling a smile that lit up her entire face. She could almost pass for a younger Donna.

The Doctor smiled back. "Ah, no thanks," he said. "Turns out I'm not all that hungry after all." This human biology was clearly flawed if he could feel raging starvation one moment and flat coldness the next.

"Well, you look like you could use something to eat, at any rate. You're so skinny I could probably knock you over just by looking at you," the young dinner lady said. The Doctor chuckled.

The dinner lady tilted her head, watching him, trying to figure him out. "Did you leave your wallet at home, love?" she asked, sympathy evident in her voice.

"Something like that. Sorry, I'll let you get on with closing up," the Doctor said, starting to walk away.

"Wait!"

He turned back around. The dinner lady glanced round the cafeteria, then jerked her head to indicate that he should come back. He came a little closer. She leaned forward conspiratorially.

"If you're desperate, I could always drop a piece of fruit on the floor and mark it down as damaged, if you know what I mean," she said in a low voice.

The Doctor grinned at her. "That would be a terrible waste indeed," he whispered back.

"How do you fancy bananas?"

"Woman after my own heart! I love bananas!"

The dinner lady passed a banana, which he immediately peeled for consumption. "What was your name?" he asked.

"Miranda," the dinner lady said with a smile.

She put her hands up to her face and whispered, "You're not management, are you? I promise I'm not giving food away!"

"No, no, nothing of the sort," the Doctor waved his free hand to stop her from panicking. "I just wanted to say thank you, Miranda."

Miranda let her hands down, relieved. "You're welcome," she said, fanning herself as if she'd been terribly nervous. "See you around?"

"Most definitely," the Doctor said, flashing his most handsome grin, the effect of which was probably diminished by a mouthful of fruit, he realized, but oh well. He polished off the rest of the banana as he exited the cafeteria.

He was thinking.

Money. That was something he was going to need now. He'd sort of managed his way around it in the past, but without the TARDIS, that wasn't a possibility anymore. He'd also need a place to stay. And probably some new clothes. And a job. He wrinkled his nose. Jobs, bleh. He couldn't help but think back fondly on when he and Martha were stranded in the Sixties, and she'd got a job in a shop to support him. He suspected that Rose would hardly stand for that sort of thing, though.

The Doctor tossed the banana peel in a bin and set off down a corridor teeming with people in suits, the office workers of Torchwood leaving for the day. He thought maybe he'd nose around the building a bit while there were fewer people in it. Just a peek to see if this Torchwood was all it was cracked up to be, he thought.

It was better than thinking about other things, anyway.

No TARDIS, no Donna, no Martha, and very possibly no Rose, it looked like. This was a tad depressing. He hadn't had much time in this body to imagine the way things would turn out, but if he'd had the time, he would have pictured something different. Him and Rose, traveling the world and later the galaxy, causing trouble all on their own. They didn't need a TARDIS for that—although admittedly it would help, and already he missed the old girl more than he could express; it was awfully lonely without her hum in the back of his head—he and Rose just needed each other.

He stopped. Or did they? Did she need him? And what did that mean anyway, "need him"? What exactly did that phrase mean? What did that kiss on the beach mean? Was it not nice for her? She'd seemed to enjoy it at the time. Maybe his technique had gotten rusty. But he'd never gotten complaints before. Why did she prolong the kiss if it was such rubbish? Why was she being so cold to him after that? Why did she kiss him in the first place if she was unhappy with him? And why did they call them "bananas", anyway?

He just didn't understand why Rose so obstinately refused to believe that he was what and who he said he was. It seemed obvious to everyone else. Even Jackie had accepted with him with no more than a sniff and a shrug.

He could find his way in this new universe, but he didn't really want to do it without Rose.

And of course, if he was honest with himself, even if the initial pain of losing her had died down somewhat, faded to a dull background ache instead of a constant splitting wound, he had missed her. At least a little bit.

Maybe a little bit more than that. Maybe a lot.

He tried not to feel hurt. He tried to will himself into patience, knowing that the last few days must have been hard on her, but that didn't make the hurt go away.

He shook his head and scuffed one shoe against the floor. He felt silly for thinking about this so much in the first place.

"Just not my world," he muttered under his breath.

The Doctor closed his fingers around the small lump of coral in his pocket, remembered the wink Donna sent him when she wordlessly pressed it into his hand on the beach. That wink told him things would be fine, in the end. (It also told him that if he so much as breathed a word about this to the other Doctor, she would bludgeon him about the head.)

Yes, he assured himself. Donna knew what she was talking—or winking—about. Things would be fine soon. Rose had just had a bit of a shock, she just needed some time, she just needed—

A scream tore through the air. Back the way the Doctor had just come.

It sounded like Miranda.

The Doctor sprinted back down the hallway, pushing past people, knocking over a mail trolley, until he reached the cafeteria entrance. A few end-of-the-day stragglers were all looking over at the counter area, each of them in a varying state of confusion or perplexity.

The Doctor no longer saw the nice dinner lady standing back there.

He ran, jumped over the counter, pushed the kitchen doors open, looked around frantically. And there she was, sprawled on the floor between the industrial metal shelves, her hand inches away from a dangling wall-mounted telephone. Its plastic earpiece shrieked out a shrill dial tone. A smudge of black fluid covered the red emergency button, as if Miranda had tried to call for help.

The Doctor knelt down by Miranda's side. He hoped she would be alive, but really, he could already tell that she wasn't. He felt for her pulse anyway, pressing his fore and middle finger to the section of soft underside where her jaw met her neck.

He was surprised to feel that her skin was warm to the touch—hot, even, hotter than a fever. Almost like she was on fire.

Whatever it was that had gotten her, it had turned her veins black. He could see the delicate network of capillaries just beneath her skin's surface, a spiderweb of black pulsating heat. Thick, dark, oily ooze dripped from her mouth and her vacant eyes that stared into nowhere. He picked up her hand and turned it over, careful not to touch the black fluid, feeling her wrist for a pulse just to be sure. But he felt nothing.

She was most definitely dead. Even her nail beds had turned a sickly black hue.

He sighed. "Or maybe this is my world after all," he said softly to no one.


	3. Chapter 3

After the debriefing, Rose shut herself in the loo for a few moments, just to give herself a chance to breathe and be alone. Fortunately, the debriefing had been short—she'd glossed over many of the details of this last inter-universe trip, not like anybody knew what a Dalek was in this universe anyway—but the discussion had still worn her out. So many questions she didn't want to answer, about the Cannon, about Mickey. About the new, kind-of-sort-of-but-not-really Doctor. All things she didn't want to think about right now.

Besides, all that really mattered to Torchwood was that the stars had come back. The events of another universe were of little consequence to them. Everything else was just a sidenote.

Rose looked up at the mirror over the sink, at the tired face staring back. She looked awful, her skin mottled by huge dark circles under her eyes, bruise-blue patches that her makeup couldn't quite cover.

She briefly glanced down at her watch—it had stopped somehow, stopped sometime after she'd reached the right universe and timeline, and she'd just never noticed. Of course. It made a weird sort of sense. Rose took off the watch and threw it in the bin.

She didn't feel like going back outside just yet, but they'd just redone the paint in the bathroom and the smell was starting to get to her, encouraging her fledgling headache into a full-grown migraine. She turned on the faucet and splashed some water on her face before leaving.

Rose took the lift back to her floor, a cardboard box in hand, so she could go ahead and pack her things. Normally she preferred to take the stairs, get that bit of exercise, but right now, she just didn't have the energy. And she felt guilty for hurting the sort-of Doctor's feelings earlier.

The sooner they both left this place, the better, she decided. Even if she still didn't know what she was going to do about him.

Rose exited the lift and strode into her department, past rows of other cubicles until she reached her own. Fortunately the department was deserted, so she wouldn't have to deal with any more prying questions. With Mickey and the rest of her original team gone in one way or another, she wasn't exactly close to anyone at work, but that didn't stop some other well-meaning coworker from occasionally attacking her with concern or, worse, pity.

She sat down at her desk and started clearing things out. It was mostly paperwork and trash. She'd never really spent enough time at the desk to keep anything personal there, preferred spending her time in the workshop or, earlier, out in the field.

She wondered what she would do now, with no job and no Doctor. Probably get a job at a shop somewhere, she thought glumly.

Rose peered through papers to see what should be kept, what should be discarded. She rifled through her desk drawers, pulled out files and folders, found some odd bits and baubles of half-assembled equipment and an unfortunately large instance of candy wrappers. She started sorting through the junk.

Junk. Junk. Junk. Rose quickly grew tired of poring over papers and started shoving them into her waste bin or recycling bin without discrimination. Her head swam and ached. This was all ridiculous, all of it. So many papers and files and they didn't mean a damn thing. She removed one drawer completely and emptied its entire contents into a wastepaper bin. It didn't matter. It was all junk.

Worthless. Stupid.

She tore stapled packets apart with a vengeance. It was very satisfying to shove their contents into the shredder, sickly delightful to watch sheets and sheets of paper metamorphose into tiny wriggling ribbon-worms out the other end. At least she could manage that.

Rose paused, took a moment to breathe, stared at her desk. She felt sort of sick, almost feverish. _Lack of sleep will do that to you_, she thought. Aside from her nap in the car, she couldn't remember the last time she'd slept.

She closed her eyes in an attempt to ward off the unpleasantness. After a second, she dove back in.

When she removed the last folder in the last drawer, something softly protested, scraping quietly against the particle board. She frowned. She dug her fingers around a bit at the back until she felt something distinctly non-paperlike. It was small, hard, cold, and a bit jagged. She pulled it out from its hiding place.

It was her key to the TARDIS.

Rose turned the key over in her hands for a moment, studying it. Several years ago, she brought the key in for analysis, hoping it could tell her something, anything. But even after running it through every test imaginable in every department, she was unable to get any readings off it. The key had remained stubbornly silent. It really was just a key, nothing special about it. After the umpteenth test with no results, Rose had angrily shoved it into her desk. And then she forgot about it.

Rose gripped the key tightly in one hand, its sharp little teeth biting into her palm. She did not need this reminder right now. She did not need to think about all of the tests, all of the studies, all of the late-night work, all of the jumps, all of the wrong timelines—

She shook her head. _Snap out of it_. No good in dwelling on what could have been.

Rose tried to chastise herself for her attitude, tried to bolster her own spirits like she had done so many times over the last couple of years—an endless mantra of _don't worry, keep working, you'll get there, things will get better!_—but the dialogue was half-hearted, and a nagging voice at the back of her head chimed in that maybe it was good enough that she got to see the real Doctor one last time, and she could finally let herself recover, move on and live a normal life.

Normal life. She wrinkled her nose at that.

The key was still on a bit of chain, so Rose slipped it on over her head like a necklace, almost out of habit more than anything else. She tucked it down under her jacket. Its weight was still familiar against her chest, and a strange mixture of nostalgia and anxiety threatened to overcome her.

She shook her head. The breakdown could wait until she got home. But she could feel the pressure of tears trying to build up behind her eyes.

Suddenly, and so marvelously-timed it could hardly be coincidence, a loud alarm chose that moment to start blaring through the building.

"Code 5 Alert," a female voice announced coolly as red lights flashed overhead. "Code 5 Alert. All personnel must report to sickbay immediately. This is not a drill. Please proceed to sickbay in a swift and calm manner. This is a Code 5 Alert."

Well, that sounded bad.

"What's a Code 5, again?" Rose asked a passing employee. He was a young, tall blond gentleman with a nervous look on his face—Jared, she thought his name probably was.

"Viruses or diseases or something like that," probably-Jared said in a worried voice.

Rose breathed in sharply.

"I dunno, I heard some kind of commotion downstairs earlier, but I didn't think it was anything serious," Jared continued, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his shirtsleeve. He was normally rather pale anyway, but today, he was so pale he looked like he might pass out—the lockdown must have really freaked him out. "They found a body in the cafeteria, I think they're worried it may be to do with the food. They're going to seal the building for quarantine," he told Rose.

_A body in the cafeteria._

Jared kept talking, but his words were drowned out by a low buzz in Rose's ears.

_What if...?_

Hardly aware of what she was doing, Rose dashed out of her department, startling Jared and scattering papers as she flew by. She skidded over to the lift at the end of the hall. She smacked the button desperately several times before realizing that of course, emergency protocol meant lifts were down. She bolted over to the stairwell instead, threw the door open, took the stairs two or three at a time, pushing past the two or three other Torchwood operatives walking down the stairs.

"They said to exit calmly," one employee sniffed as she shoved on by.

Rose's heart thumped in her throat. She'd sent the Doctor to the cafeteria. And now there was a body. _What-if-what-if-what-if_ echoed in her ears on endless repeat.

Rose landed at the cafeteria floor. "You're going the wrong way," someone pointed out, barring her way into the hall. She ducked under his arm and around another agent and promptly ran into an abandoned caretaker's trolley, stubbing her toe hard enough to make it bleed. She barely noticed. She kept running until she arrived at the lunch room.

She took a few seconds to gather her breath. She peeked into the room through the round cafeteria door windows. Someone had put up plastic sheeting inside the doors, so it was difficult to make much out, but she could see enough to guess what was going on. Rose was troubled to see several agents in what looked like HAZMAT suits standing around the cafeteria.

Oh, that was bad. Really bad.

The suited agents scanned every inch of the place, entering data into their tablets and laptops, scraping samples off tables and chairs and the food counter. Rose watched as several operatives shone a blue light over the place, looking for biological fluids.

Then her eyes fell on the worst thing of all—and her stomach lurched awfully—in the far corner, there stood a stretcher, a covered body lying still atop it.

Rose felt her blood drain from her head as she remembered another stretcher, and another body, in a cold, dark room, with the TARDIS dying somewhere nearby…

Rose burst through the doors, running toward the body on the stretcher. But before she could get too far, one of the HAZMAT-suited agents stepped in to stop her.

"You can't be in here, Agent Tyler," the agent said. "Essential personnel only."

"No, no, you don't understand," Rose choked out. "That could be my friend under there, I just need to check, I can help—"

"Know what's going on, do you? Then you can answer some questions in the back room. Now can you please take care of her?" the lead agent snapped to his subordinate. "And actually lock the bloody doors?" he barked to someone else.

"Affirmative," the agent replied, grasping Rose's arm. He dragged Rose away toward a storage room at the back of the cafeteria.

"Where are you taking me?" she demanded, glancing back at the stretcher, struggling against the agent's tight grip.

"Decontamination," the agent responded. "We both have to undergo decontamination before I can escort you to sickbay."

He opened the door to the deserted storage room and pulled her in. The storage room was normally full of stocked and loaded shelves, canned and packaged foodstuffs and plasticware, but now it was rigged as a decontamination station with a portable shower. Large dispensers of cleaning chemicals sat in one corner, chemicals that would not be intended for human skin in any other situation.

Rose panicked after the door closed and clicked behind them. She didn't have time for this rubbish—couldn't they see that someone had _died_ out there?

"Let me out!" Rose spat. She kicked the agent in the shin and leapt for the door.

The agent didn't let go of her, but the groan that emerged behind the mask sounded familiar.

"Blimey, Rose, what did you have to go and do that for?"

Rose knew that voice. She stopped in her tracks. The HAZMAT agent removed his hood.

Sure enough, it was the new Doctor.

Rose let out a breath of relief upon seeing his face. Then she remembered which Doctor she was looking at. She forced her haphazard breathing to normalize. "Stupid git," she blurted out.

"Nice to see you too," he grumbled, massaging his shin.

"What's going on? Why are you in a suit?" Rose demanded.

"Well, they wouldn't let me back in without one, so I sort of went and…acquired it," he answered. "Had to get in somehow, didn't I, find out what's happened."

Rose took a few more deep breaths to calm herself. "Okay," she said. "So what's happened? What's going on here?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but your Torchwood seems to think it's really bad. We've got three dead bodies so far."

"So far?"

The Doctor nodded grimly. "Something pretty nasty is at work here. Some kind of contagion, something I've never seen before. Whatever it is, it altered her blood at the molecular level, gave her a fever high enough to cook her from the inside out."

"God," Rose breathed, wincing. "That's awful. You don't have any idea what it is?"

"Not a clue," the Doctor said, his eyes darting back and forth as he thought out loud. "And from the chatter, it doesn't sound like it matches anything in your database, either. Some of the agents think that it's some sort of evolved form of the Black Plague—"

"The Plague?" Rose asked incredulously. "Is that what you think?"

The Doctor shook his head. "The Black Plague got its eponymous dark and discoloured spots from necrotic tissue. It didn't turn blood black. I can't think of any human disease that does." He drew a deep breath, thinking. "I don't think it's from around here," he concluded.

The Doctor looked Rose up and down. "Are you all right? You look a bit flushed or something."

Rose blushed, suddenly shy. She realized how close she'd been standing to him this whole time. Like he was the real Doctor. She took a half-step back.

"So it's not from around here. Like from England, or…?" she trailed off, shrugging with her hands.

"More like this galaxy," the Doctor said firmly.

"Well, that narrows it down," Rose replied.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest, another barrier between her and the not-Doctor. "What else do you know about it, about whatever got the person out there?" she asked. "Did you say 'her' earlier?"

The Doctor's face went dark. "Yeah, it was one of the dinner ladies, Miranda. Did you know her?"

Rose shook her head.

"Pity," the Doctor lamented. "She was nice. Gave me a free banana."

Rose softened a little bit at that. He couldn't have known the woman for more than a few minutes, and he'd already grown attached.

"I'm sorry," she offered.

"But that's not what you asked," he sailed on. "You asked what I knew about what killed her. I don't know much, I'd need the sonic to get a good reading. Oh, I hadn't even thought of that yet, the sonic. I'll need to build myself a new one. I wonder where a fellow can find a subminiature electroacoustic transducer in this universe. In any case, whatever got Miranda is very fast-acting. She wasn't presenting any symptoms when I spoke to her a few moments before. So she must have contracted it here, in the building." He frowned. "But it shouldn't be transmittable by air, otherwise we'd all have got it by now, wouldn't we? Same with touch. And it can't be the food either, same thing, not enough people are sick, and I ate something she handed right to me, and I'm fit as a fiddle. I'm guessing it needs to be transmitted by the exchange of fluids, or it needs to enter the bloodstream directly, or maybe it only affects certain people, people with some sort of…"

The Doctor trailed off. He was staring at Rose's left foot.

"Rose, you're bleeding."

Rose looked down. "Right," she said, surprised. Her ballet flat was spotted with blood where she had stubbed her toe, thick red spreading slowly amongst the grey. She hadn't really noticed it before, but now, as if it knew it had her attention, a tiny twinge of pain sprung up. "I guess I am, then," she said. "Weird."

"Did you happen to step in a puddle of black stuff?" the Doctor asked slowly, staring at her shoe.

"I don't know. I don't think so. I think I jammed my toe or something."

Rose looked down again—there was definitely something black on her shoe. "Didn't think I'd hit it that hard," she said, pushing her hair behind her ear to keep it out of her eyes. The Doctor grabbed her hand.

"Oi!" she started to say, but the Doctor wasn't paying attention, he was studying her fingers.

"We've got a problem," he murmured. His face was pale. He turned Rose's hand over for her to see. She saw that her nail beds were dark, far darker than usual.

Almost black, even.

"What is that?" she asked, looking over her hands. Then she realized the implication. Rose looked up at the Doctor, alarmed. "Have I got it? Whatever it is?" she asked nervously. "But how?"

The Doctor's face tensed. His eyes darted away as he tried to think of an answer to her question. He was gripping Rose's wrist very tightly. She could feel his pulse hammering in his thumb. It was the frantic, very human beating of only one heart, nearly in time with her own.

She was surprised. He was much more nervous than he appeared.

"I don't know," he said after a moment, relaxing his hold on her. "But we've got to get you down to sickbay. Now."

"No, I'm telling you, this wasn't here before," they heard from outside the door. Rose glanced over to the doorway, looked down, realized she'd left a trail running in here, a smattering of her blood tinged with the dark stuff. How had she not noticed the wound before now? She must have missed it in her haste to make sure that the almost-Doctor was all right. But now it was really starting to hurt.

The doorknob turned, but only partially—the sort-of Doctor had locked it. Rose whipped back around to see him peeling off the HAZMAT gear, his blue suit on underneath. "You don't have time to answer all of their questions," he said, handing the HAZMAT pieces to her. "Get this on, go down to sickbay, and tell them you've been exposed. Tell them they need to slow your metabolism to delay the onset of the contagion."

He pulled off the boots and handed them to her. "Whatever you do, don't stop until you get to sickbay," the Doctor said. "Don't stop, not for anything."

Outside, the agents started trying to open the door more forcefully. "Who's got a key?" one of them asked.

"What about you? Without the suit, won't you be exposed to the contagion or whatever it is?" Rose asked the Doctor.

"The suit was just to get me back inside the cafeteria, and now to get you back out," he replied, helping her pull the suit on over her clothes. "Besides, one of the infected was wearing a suit when he got sick and died, so it doesn't look like the suits make a difference."

He paused for a second. "And really, we've all been exposed by now anyway, just by being in this building. But then why aren't more people sick? Oh, but now I've given you my suit, and I'm not authorized to be in here, that's not good. Ha, but none of the agents have seen my face yet. I could tell them I got locked in here by accident, I could tell them I got a case of the hysterics, I could tell them I'm the new dinner lady and I got lost—"

"Or you could go out the window," Rose pointed out as she zipped up the suit.

The Doctor looked back and noticed the window at the back of the room for the first time, peeking out from behind the curtains of the portable shower. "Or I could go out the window," he agreed.

"What are you going to do?"

The Doctor helped Rose set her helmet on straight amidst the sound of agents banging against the door. "I'm going to find out what this thing is, and I'm going to stop it."

He pressed something small and solid into Rose's gloved hand. "I don't know how long it will take the contagion to spread through your body. You just get down to sickbay no matter what. You hear me?" he said. "No matter what."

Rose nodded. The Doctor tilted her helmet slightly and gave it a kiss.

"Just like old times, eh?" he said with a tender half-smile.

Rose swallowed the strange swell of emotions that tried to come up at that. But she didn't argue. It was hot inside the suit. And itchy. And her foot hurt. And she was worried. "Good luck," she said to him.

"Not worried about me," he mumbled. "As soon as you can—_run_."

He sprinted through the shower curtains toward the back of the room. He threw open the window sash and pulled himself out.

As soon as he was gone, the storage room door burst open. Three HAZMAT-suited agents stood right outside.

"What are you doing? What's going on in here?" one of the agents demanded.

"Erm, got locked in," Rose said in her best impersonation of a male voice—she wasn't sure if there were any female operatives in any of the suits.

"Where's Agent Tyler?" one of the other agents asked.

"She's back there, she's having trouble or something," Rose gestured behind the decontamination shower curtains. She remembered the object in her hand, looked down, saw it was a glass phial. "I've got to get this to the lab," she said, grateful that the almost-Doctor had given her a quick way out and trusted her to realize it.

She slid past the agents in the suits, closed the door behind her, and walked away quickly, willing herself not to run, otherwise she'd give herself away.

It didn't take long for them to realize the room was empty.

"She's gone—grab that bloke," she heard one of the workers saying.

She took off before anyone could get near her.

"Hey! Stop!"

Rose only stopped long enough to unlock the cafeteria doors, and one of the agents almost caught her. She elbowed him in the solar plexus, hard, and he fell backward into one of his coworkers. Rose pushed off, leapt out into the hallway and ran toward the stairwell as fast as her legs could carry her. She was now extremely aware of the pain blossoming up her leg from her damaged toe.

Two burly security agents ran close behind her.

With hardly a moment's thought about why, Rose grabbed a mop from the nearby caretaker's trolley before she sprang into the stairwell. She threw her body against the doors to keep them closed and jammed the mop pole through the two door handles.

The two agents banged on the other side of the doors. The mop handle didn't budge.

"We've got a situation down here!" Rose heard one of the security officers shout.

She slouched at the door for just a moment, gasping through the pain in her chest. How had she gotten so out of shape? Or was it the virus, or whatever she had? She put a hand to her head—she definitely felt odd.

After a moment, she darted up another flight of stairs. She made sure the coast was clear and no one else was approaching. She tore off the HAZMAT suit and squished it into a stairwell bin. Rose hoped that the kind-of Doctor was right, and the suit wouldn't somehow infect anyone who passed by. Although then again, if he was right, then they'd all been exposed and one more contaminant would hardly make a difference.

She heard something on the stairwell beneath her. She looked down to see two more security agents running up toward her, their long muscular legs propelling them at an alarming speed.

Time to go.

Rose half-ran, half-pulled herself up the stairs using the hand-rail, squeezing back tears of pain, willing herself to get to sickbay in time. Her lungs burned and her foot ached and her eyes watered, but she was not going to stop, she was not going to die of some alien cold, she just _wasn't_.

She kept running.


	4. Chapter 4

The Doctor felt a sudden and unanticipated appreciation for Spider-Man after he shimmied up the storm pipe and eased himself back inside through an open window.

He landed inside a dark and empty office area, dotted with empty cubicles robbed of their inhabitants. He located a computer with an unlocked screen and, for once, blessed the absentmindedness of the human brain—he didn't have the time to try to break into a locked computer, not without the sonic, anyway.

The Doctor sighed. He really missed the sonic right about now.

He sat down at the computer desk, his fingers flying over the keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the owner of this desk had a Yoda bobble**-**head figurine, of all things. He rather liked it.

"You and me, then, eh?" he said to the Yoda bobblehead. "Yoda and the Doctor. That seems fitting somehow."

He accessed Torchwood's secure server with relative ease, scanning their interdepartmental correspondence to see if he could glean anything helpful on this virus, or contagion, or whatever it was. Of course, Torchwood had not gathered very much information, and their tests had not yielded any definitive results, but he had expected that. Very little time had passed since the beginning of the outbreak and it was unlikely anyone here had ever dealt with something like this before.

Still, something seemed off about this whole thing.

"I have to admit this has me stymied," the Doctor told Bobble-head Yoda, but of course the figurine didn't respond, save to bobble his head unhelpfully when the Doctor poked it. "There's absolutely nothing useful in any of these health and safety reports. All I can find in here that's halfway interesting is a report on the new paint job and some complaints of mold. That's not terribly relevant, is it?"

Yoda nodded sympathetically.

"That's about what I thought," the Doctor agreed.

He squinted at the computer screen, a little disgruntled to find that in this human body, he may actually need reading glasses. Well, that was just wonderful. He blamed Donna's faulty human DNA. Probably she wore contact lenses all the time and just never told him.

He clicked through several more files, scanning through boring reports and useless department communications until his eyes fell on one particularly intriguing bit of text. His eyebrows shot upward in surprise.

"Now here's something interesting," the Doctor said. "According to these files, the blood samples sent to the lab indicate no trace of antibodies in Miranda's system. That means it can't be a disease or virus, her body would have started fighting back pretty much instantly," he explained to Bobblehead Yoda. "Bodies are sort of handy that way. Get it? Handy?"

He wriggled his new-old right hand at Bobblehead Yoda, but received no response.

"You're right," the Doctor said, "This is no time for puns. Although personally I feel that most times are good times for puns."

He glanced over the sickbay's records.

"Well, now." He peered more closely at the screen. "We've got one more sick patient on file. Says here he started presenting symptoms after arriving in sickbay for the quarantine. Miranda fell sick in the cafeteria, the second patient fell ill almost immediately after stepping foot in the building, and another took ill in the lift, the gent in the HAZMAT suit. That last one was dead within seconds."

He tried not to think about what that meant for Rose.

The Doctor leaned back in his chair. "So whatever it is, it's fast-acting, clearly spread throughout the entire building, but it's only affecting a handful of people."

He clicked impatiently through a few more files. "How am I supposed to cure something if I can't figure out what it is?" the Doctor asked Bobblehead Yoda. But Bobblehead Yoda was, as usual, silent and withholding.

The Doctor frowned. He just couldn't put his finger on it, whatever it was. Clearly it wasn't a virus, it wasn't a disease, it didn't appear to be bacteria, and it didn't have the hallmarks of an infection. But that didn't make any sense. There was nothing else it could be. Torchwood's team was just overlooking something, that was all.

He'd have to make his way into their lab and see the test results for himself, inspect the blood and tissue samples and hopefully the HAZMAT-suited body to find out what exactly this thing was. That was the only way to stop the contagion, to save Rose and anyone else who might be affected.

He still wondered how Rose and the others had contracted the contagion in the first place. He had initially thought perhaps Rose was exposed via her mangled toe, but none of the other patients had shown any wounds or telltale marks, according to the autopsy reports.

Curiouser and curiouser. Hopefully the lab would have something useful for him.

"So long, then," the Doctor said to Bobblehead Yoda before he left. "Although I can say from experience, 900 years old is no excuse to let yourself go."

The Doctor quietly loped from one end of the room to the other, stuck his head out into the dark hallway, looked both ways. Of course the coast was clear, even if the faulty fluorescent light flickering above gave him an uneasy feeling. He quickly located the Torchwood directory on the wall, scanning it for the location of the laboratory.

Something clicked at the end of the hallway. He snapped around, scanning for any Torchwood security agents that might have found him, but nobody was there. He took a few steps forward in the flickering lights and gave a good long look anyway just to be safe.

Nothing. Just a quiet buzz-hum in the air, could easily be the cheap overhead lighting. He turned back to the directory.

Miranda was standing there.

* * *

Rose pushed through the small throng of Torchwood employees crowded around the sickbay entrance. It was all she could do to keep herself standing. She wasn't sure if this was the contagion or just nerves, but she was slowly starting to feel more and more feverish, like her veins were on fire.

Rose heard the stairwell doors fling open behind her. The agents chasing her had finally caught up. She ducked into the crowd before they could see her.

When nothing happened for a few moments, she chanced a look back—they were scanning the crowd for her. She crouched as low as she could without drawing attention to herself (one of the perks of being short, she noted). She slowly limped over to the first nurse she saw, a young man in full surgeon's garb with a mask and everything. The nurse was busy taking an agent's blood pressure.

"Be with you in a moment, Agent Tyler," the nurse said without taking his eyes off his patient.

"I've been exposed," Rose said breathlessly, scanning the back of the room to make sure she was still safe from her pursuers.

"We've probably all been exposed, it was a dinner lady what had it," the nurse's patient snapped. "Probably gave us all Typhoid disease or something."

"No," Rose shook her head, struggling to breathe normally, "You don't understand, it's not spread by air or anything like that, it's something else, and I've been exposed."

She looked down at her hands. The small veins in the soft underside of her wrist had started going dark. The sight sent her blood pressure plummeting, leaving her light-headed. She showed her wrist to the nurse.

"Look, it's already begun," she said.

To his credit, the nurse didn't ask any questions, but immediately dropped what he was doing and took her by the arm, leading her to the back of sickbay.

"We've got another live one," he said into his walkie-talkie.

"Live one?" Rose asked, a little dizzy from her fever. "There's more?"

"There's you and another fellow that are still alive," the nurse informed her.

_Still alive_, Rose noted with a sinking feeling.

The nurse brought her to a hospital-style room with several cots and one other inhabitant. It took a moment for Rose to recognize him—it was Jared.

Rose was shocked at his condition. Jared was a swimmer, or a sprinter, or something else that gave him a lean, but tightly-muscled physique. Passing by him in the hallway, she'd silently appreciated his pretty arms and pleasant bum on more than one occasion. But now, his cheeks were hollow, his skin nearly translucent, and his once-strong body seemed small, slowly seizing in on itself. Rose couldn't believe how rapidly he'd changed in just the short amount of time that had passed since their greeting earlier.

Rose wondered how long she had before she became like that.

Jared did not respond to any of the commotion around him. He just stared ahead with glassy eyes. Rose watched him as several nurses attended to her, situating her on a cot, peeling off her jacket and taking her vitals. One nurse handed her some paracetamol for her fever and another draped a cold compress over the back of her neck. Through her increasing head-fog, Rose managed to feel very sorry for Jared; he'd seemed nice enough.

She couldn't help but notice that Jared already had some black at the corners of his mouth.

* * *

"What are you?" the Doctor posited to the dead body standing in front of him, the one that used to be a dinner lady named Miranda.

"You know what this body is," Miranda's body responded, slow and thick, her tongue weighing heavy in its mouth.

The Doctor winced at what she had become. The formerly sweet voice was now rasping and rough, as if it had been torn apart and stitched back together poorly. Behind a ragged curtain of matted hair, her eyes blinked just a fraction of a second too slowly, sliding open and closed over dull, solid-black eyes. Her dark veins had become more pronounced now; the Doctor could see them all over her body—in her face, in her hands, in the tissue-thin flesh stretching over her sternum.

_Poor, poor lovely dinner lady_, the Doctor thought. _You didn't deserve this._

"This is the Miranda," the body told him finally.

"Yes, well, general rule of thumb: most English-speaking peoples don't refer to themselves in the third person," the Doctor replied. "Also, they're usually not dead and covered in black stuff. I don't know, I guess I'm just a stickler for details."

Miranda's body did not reply, but continued to drool a bit of the black stuff, thick and wet and foul, filling the air with the smells of mildew and rotting things.

"You've got a bit of—" the Doctor gestured toward his mouth, mirroring the black drool on Miranda's face. Miranda did not respond. "No? All right then," the Doctor finished.

"The Letrion need your help," Miranda eked out.

"And what are the Letrion?"

"Not what. Who. And impolite to ask."

"Well it's a bit late for that now; you want my help, you're going to answer a few questions," the Doctor said, and he wondered if that pesky quiet buzzing noise would ever stop. "So! First things first. What are you?"

Miranda paused. "We are the Letrion," she said after a moment. "We can tell you no more than that."

"Ah," the Doctor said, shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking on the balls of his feet. "But you see, you've already told me so much. See, your use of the word 'we' indicates the plural, indicates lack of sense of individual self, and that combined with the low-level telepathic field you're projecting hints at a hive mind of some sort—which, by the way, if you could dampen it down a bit, I'd really appreciate it, it sort of creates a very unpleasant buzzing noise for us touch telepaths, sort of vibrates in our teeth—so I already know there's more than one of you in there and out here and you're all mentally linked by said telepathic field. How am I doing so far?" he asked, turning his head sideways and grinning.

"The Letrion needs your help," Miranda repeated.

"Nope, if you want me to help you, first you've got to help me," the Doctor said cheerfully. "I want to know what you're doing to these people, and why."

Miranda's body eyed him distrustfully, or as distrustfully as it could given its glazed-over eyes. "We need a place to live," she told him. "A place to grow."

* * *

"You need to…do a metabolism thing," Rose managed to tell her nurse as he took care of her damaged toe. She'd splintered the toenail, torn it almost completely off. It was quite bloody, and though that was hardly anything new for Rose, the black stuff seeping from the wound made her feel sick to look at. Rose kept her eyes trained on the nurse's face instead. "Reduce my metabolism…to slow down the…infection thing…" she said weakly.

The nurse looked surprised. "You study Medical Theory, Agent Tyler?" he asked.

"No. Just got some smart friends."

"Don't worry, we've got some serum on the way for you now. It's a basic slow-acting agent to help deal with unknown contagions."

"Did you use that on the others?" Rose asked.

The nurse hesitated. "We've got Jared on it right now," he said, attempting a pleasant attitude for her sake. "Jared's on it, and we're getting promising results."

Rose's eyes flickered over to Jared, took in his darkening eyes, his slack face, his dark veins. Those results certainly did not look promising.

The nurse finished dressing her wound, replaced his gloves, and plugged the ends of his stethoscope into his ears. "While we're waiting for the serum, I'm going to need you to take some deep breaths for me," he instructed Rose. She nodded in understanding. He pressed the stethoscope pad against her chest and back.

"So tell me a bit about—"

"You don't need to do that," Rose said. "I know it's bad. You don't have to comfort me or distract me. Just tell me how bad it is."

Another nurse arrived with the serum, pushed up Rose's sleeve and started swabbing her arm in preparation for a shot. "This will help slow down the progress of the contagion," she explained.

"Please just tell me how bad it is," Rose asked the first nurse, ignoring the unpleasantness of her serum-shot as the needle pierced into the soft flesh of her inner arm. "I have a right to know."

"You don't want to know," he told her firmly.

Rose fought back the urge to be nasty. She tried to remember the nurse's name. She'd been here enough times, seemed like she'd have all of the medical staff memorized by now.

Ugh, people skills. She hadn't needed them in a long time. This sort of thing used to come to her so easily.

_All right_, she thought to herself. _You can do this. 30-ish, stocky, Japanese, buzzed hair, thick-rimmed glasses, perpetual 5 o'clock shadow under the mask, one of four male nurses in the building. You can remember his name. Something with a hard "G" sound at the beginning. Garrett? No, too nerdy. Greg? Too typical. Gary? Too old._

_Oh, bugger it, just throw something out there. _

"It's Greg, isn't it?" she ventured.

The nurse nodded with a quick "Yep". Rose congratulated herself silently.

"Okay Greg, if this was happening to you, wouldn't you want to know what it was?" Rose prompted.

Greg finished writing the notes on his sheet. "There. We'll keep an eye on your progress and give you a dose of the serum about once every half hour," he said. "Hopefully that will buy us some time until we can find a cure. In the meantime, let's see if we can get you comfortable."

"Greg. Tell me."

Greg looked up from his clipboard. "I have every confidence that we will discover a cure for this, Agent Tyler," he told her.

"I've been here long enough to know what that means," Rose said. "I know you're doing your best, and I'm grateful, really, but...I have a right to know what's happening to me. I need to know the worst case scenario."

She paused for a moment. "Please," she added.

Greg hesitated. He glanced over at Jared, perhaps thinking he didn't want to hear this, but Jared just stared into space. Greg looked like he may keep his silence, but eventually, he spoke.

"All right then," he said. "The fact is...we don't know what this is, or how it's doing what it's doing. It doesn't match anything we have in our databanks. It acts like a virus, but it certainly isn't. Whatever it is…"

Greg looked like he might be searching for the right words to make the situation sound less awful, but he came up with nothing, shaking his head a little.

"It's contaminating your fluids, causing radical changes at the molecular level," he explained. "That's why you've been feeling feverish—it's a side effect of the chemical changes. But we're not sure how or why the change is happening, or what's causing it."

* * *

"You're parasites," the Doctor concluded. "You're altering your hosts' body chemistry so you can survive comfortably. And of course those changes kill the host."

Miranda didn't respond, didn't confirm or correct him, just watched through dead eyes.

"So here's my next question," the Doctor continued. "Why do you choose the people you choose? This building's full of people, any one of them as good a host as the next, yet most of them are unaffected. And even among the infected, the incubation periods vary wildly. What is your pattern?"

Miranda shook its head. "No more talk. Help us," it rasped.

"Now hang on," the Doctor said, thoughtful. "I'm not finished asking questions. I want to know why you've targeted only certain people. Specifically, my friend. Tell me why you chose her. And tell me how long she's got."

"Promise to help us and we will answer all of your questions," Miranda told him.

The Doctor paused. "I can't make any promises," he said truthfully, "Not until I know everything."

"Promise to help us, or the Letrion will kill the Rose."

The Doctor's face contorted into a dangerous grimace. "I don't take well to threats," he said in a low growl. "Tell me why you chose to infect her and the others, or you'll never get anything from me."

"Help the Letrion or we will kill the Rose now."

* * *

"As the contagion matures, it will…well, it won't just affect your blood, though that's bad enough. It will eventually start targeting your organs as well," Greg finished.

Rose did not reply. She did not know what to say.

Greg watched her for a reaction, his own expression worried, apologetic. "It's awful, I know," he said quietly. "I'm sorry there isn't a better way to tell you that."

Rose felt like she should be more upset about this, but she mostly felt tired. "Is there anything else I should know?" she asked.

Greg shook his head. "That's about all there is, I'm afraid."

Rose nodded.

"I'm sorry I don't have better news for you. But we're doing everything we can, Agent Tyler."

Rose looked down at her hands. The blackness around her nail beds had darkened and spread. "It's all right," she murmured. "It's not your fault."

"We'll do our best to make you comfortable," Greg assured her. "We caught it early enough that the serum may afford you some additional time. You've already made it longer than any of the others, and that gives us some hope."

Rose chuckled a bit at that. She'd quickly discovered a surprising resiliency to disease in this new universe—flus and colds and viruses were rarely a concern, and when she did contract them, they were gone in the blink of an eye—and she suspected it was a residual effect of traveling in the TARDIS. The thought had comforted her in the past. But she doubted the TARDIS had ever encountered anything like this before.

She knew it wasn't fair to compare the new Doctor to the old, but she couldn't help but feel that the real Doctor may have fixed everything by now.

"In the meantime..." Greg started to say. He hesitated. "In the meantime, just to be safe, if there's anyone you'd like to say goodbye to, now would probably be the time to give them a call."

He grasped her shoulder. "I'll give you a bit of privacy," he said before leaving.

Rose sat in silence. The serum shot had dulled the fiery pain somewhat, but it was still there, lurking beneath the surface. She could feel it warming her veins, pulsing in her temples, waiting to strike.

She looked over at Jared again, who already looked even worse than he did just a few moments before. He lay flat on his back on the cot, a few greyish tearstains on his face, irritating his cheeks with their caustic content. She wondered if he'd already said his goodbyes to anyone, or if he had anyone to say goodbyes to.

Rose reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her mobile, started to dial her mum, stopped. She looked over at Jared again.

He looked so miserable. It was pretty clear that he was too far gone to save.

Rose glanced down at her phone, "Mum" flashing on the screen. She thought about hitting the call button, but couldn't stop thinking about the man that was about to die in front of her.

Who did he have to say goodbye to? Anybody?

"So, Jared," she said, extending her mobile out to him. "Who do you want to talk to?"

* * *

"If I promise to help you, will you let her go?" the Doctor asked sharply. "And will she be all right?"

"Yes, if the Traveler helps us, we will set the Rose free, and all effects will reverse," Miranda told him.

"I take it that the Traveler is me, then?" the Doctor asked.

Miranda nodded.

"All right," the Doctor said. "I promise I will help you. I give you my word." He pursed his lips and took a deep breath in through his nostrils. "Now why did you choose your hosts over everyone else in the building?"

Miranda licked its lips, distributing the black stuff all around. It was disgusting. "We are drawn to them," Miranda responded. "They call to the Letrion."

"Well I doubt that, very few people typically volunteer to host a parasite." The Doctor thought for a second. "Well actually, there is that Knavrosian cult that would be all over that, but that's neither here nor there."

"They reach out with their thoughts. Their feelings," Miranda told him. "They cry out in the darkness. We hear them when they cry."

"So your telepathy field extends outside your species," the Doctor asked. "And you seek out hosts with a certain telepathic signature?"

"The Letrion must maintain the hive at all costs," Miranda responded. "We are drawn to those who do not belong. We feel them. Feel their loneliness and pain. In our world, we must save those who stray from the hive. Save them to end their pain. But here, we feel it everywhere. People who do not belong. People who are…alone."

She shuddered at the word, like it was a curse, like it was the worst thing in the world. The Doctor did not necessarily disagree.

"We smelled it on the Rose," Miranda's body whispered. "So very strong. A siren song of longing and despair."

"Right," the Doctor said, caught between sympathy and disgust. He was very glad that he could not properly use his own telepathy without the power of touch, could not sense anything of the Letrion beyond their low-level hum—he could not imagine the burden of feeling everyone else's unhappiness. He could barely cope with his own.

"You're lonely. I get it. So is everyone else in the world, you don't see them going on a rampage. Most of them, anyway." The Doctor crossed his arms. "So what do you want from me?"

"We need the Traveler to take us home."

That gave the Doctor some pause. "Home? Why can't you get there yourself? How did you get here if you can't get back?"

"We fell victim to the nothing," Miranda whispered, and her eyelids fluttered as her possessors remembered. "The stars went out, and the nothing came. We fled to the Void. But then we heard the song of the Vortex, and followed the song to safety."

"You're hitchhikers," the Doctor realized. "The reality bomb destroyed your world and you escaped to the Void, somehow survived long enough to hitch a ride here with the TARDIS."

"But now we feel that the universe is mended," Miranda told him. "The nothingness is gone. The blackness has faded. The stars have returned home, and so must we. And the Traveler will help us."

Despite his disgust for the parasites, the Doctor found himself almost pitying them.

"No," he said quietly, shaking his head. "I'm sorry. I can't. There are no more rifts between the universes. You're stuck here, just like me."

"Then the Traveler will find another way," Miranda hissed.

The Doctor shook his head again. "It's not possible," he said. "I'm sorry. You can't go home. You're going to have to adapt and learn to live here, I'm afraid. We'll figure something out. But only after you let my friend go."

Miranda raised her chin in defiance. "If you do not help us, we will consume the companion Rose, and any others we see fit," she threatened.

"No," the Doctor argued. "There's another way, I know there is, if we can just…"

He trailed off. A thought had suddenly occurred to him. A very unpleasant thought indeed.

"Hang on," he said. "I never told you my friend's name was Rose. So how do you know who she is?" he asked.

Miranda did not respond. The Doctor took a menacing step forward.

"How do you know?" he said loudly.

* * *

"I had just got my certification for field agent," Jared said. Every word was a strain, a struggle through coughs full of thick black fluid. Rose sat next to him on his cot, holding a paper cup full of water, giving him a drink when he looked like he needed it. He was obviously in a lot of pain. "Just needed to fill out my paperwork, and then the job was mine," Jared wheezed.

"You're still going to be a field agent, you know that, right?" Rose asked.

Jared scoffed. "Not bloody likely," he mumbled. "I'm going to rot down here, and I dropped my stupid mobile upstairs, and it has all my numbers on it. Never thought I'd need to have them all memorized, you know? Stupid bloody smartphone. Now I won't even get to tell my girlfriend goodbye." He sighed. "She doesn't even know I'm in here."

"You've got a girlfriend, then? What's she like?"

Jared cracked a sad smile then. "I guess I should say my ex."

Rose clucked in sympathy. "That's too bad. Sorry about that, mate."

"Yeah. Things weren't going so well. Long-distance relationships, you know how they are."

"You have no idea," Rose said drily.

"But I dunno, I always thought maybe there was still hope. I thought, maybe I'll fly over there sometime and surprise her. She lives in the States now. I'd go over there and bring her flowers and take her to Disneyland or something."

A few greyish tears welled up in his eyes. "And now I'll never get a chance to do it, because I'm going to die because from some kind of…god, I don't even know what this is. Did it take anyone else this long to die?"

"I don't know. Maybe we got a dose of that serum early enough to slow down the damage. And you're not going to die," Rose said firmly, squeezing Jared's hand. "There's…"

She hesitated. She felt odd about what she was going to say next.

"There's a man out there who's going to save us," she told Jared. "He's, well, he's different. Not your usual bloke. But he's done stuff like this loads of times. Both of us have. We save people, that's what we do. What we did. I guess he still does."

Rose had this nagging little feeling in the back of her head like she was somehow betraying the real Doctor in comparing the new Doctor to him. She didn't even know if the new Doctor was capable of the same stuff as his older counterpart. She may very well be talking out of her ass, Rose realized.

Then she noticed she was fidgeting with the TARDIS key around her neck. She dropped it and clasped her hands together instead.

"Tell me about him," Jared said. His voice was very weak.

"Well," Rose said. "He's sort of tall and skinny. Always wears a pinstripe suit with trainers. Has fantastic hair."

Jared gave a laugh, which lapsed into a cough. Rose helped him drink some water from the paper cup. His mouth left a smudged black ring behind.

"Of course he thinks he knows everything," Rose thought out loud, smiling just a little bit. "I dunno, maybe he does. Bit of a show-off. But he's brilliant, really. Just…"

She let out a slow breath. "…Brilliant."

"Are you and him a thing, then?" Jared asked.

Rose smiled embarrassedly. "I dunno," she repeated, tucking her hair behind her ear like a shy schoolgirl. She remembered how the new Doctor had grabbed that same hand earlier, the urgency of his grasp on her arm, the look on his face when he realized she was sick. "It's complicated," she told Jared.

"How complicated can it be?"

"You'd be surprised."

"Try me."

"Honestly?"

"Yeah. It can't be any weirder than this."

Rose set the paper cup down before speaking. "He's a newborn copy of someone else from another universe and I'm having a hard time dealing with the fact that that someone else apparently doesn't want me anymore, so the last few years of my life have pretty much been for nothing, and now I'm stuck here in an alternate universe with the clone of the person I love, or thought I loved, or I don't know, and now I don't know what I'm going to do with myself, or him."

Jared blinked. "And…the clone is going to save us?"

Rose nodded. "Probably, yeah."

"You're bonkers."

"Probably, yeah."

They both laughed. Rose could tell it was very painful for Jared. He was choking up a lot of the black stuff now, his shoulders shaking with the force of his coughs. Rose wiped it off his face with her suit jacket sleeve. The black blood congealed on the jacket, and the air reeked of wet wool.

"Wish he'd hurry up," Jared murmured. A few tears dripped out of his eyes, big viscous dark grey tears. "The end is coming soon. We can feel it."

"Nope, you're going to be fine, I promise," Rose assured him. Greg came over to take Jared's vitals one more time, pressing his stethoscope to Jared's chest, and Rose gently patted Jared's hand, hoping to comfort him.

Then, Rose stopped.

"What do you mean, 'we'?" Rose asked.

"Well that can't be right," Greg said, looking up from his watch. He felt at Jared's neck, too. "That really can't be right."

He brought out his stethoscope again, pressed it against Jared's chest in various places. "I need an adrenaline shot over here!" Greg called out to one of the other nurses.

"What is it?" Rose asked.

Greg didn't turn to look at her, just frowned at Jared. "You've completely flatlined. How are you even conscious?"

Jared's eyes turned and fixed on Rose. She stared back, a heavy feeling of horror mounting in her chest.

She knew now that Jared was dead. And he knew that she knew.

"Oops," he said softly.


	5. Chapter 5

"Why Rose?" the Doctor demanded. His hands balled into fists and his short nails dug grooves into his palms. "Why?"

"We smell the nothing on her," Miranda's body explained. "Smell it on you, too."

She closed her eyes, breathing him in. "A Traveler," she whispered. "Void and Vortex and time. You can help us."

"Then just take me instead!" the Doctor argued. "Look, I can't give you what you want, but that doesn't mean you have to punish Rose. You don't need her. I mean, look at me!" He gestured to his body. "I'm right here! Have me instead. My body's great. One day old, give or take. Can't beat that!"

"We can't use the Traveler's body," Miranda told him. "We tried. Your mind...we could not access it. We had to get to you through the Rose. Until the Traveler gives us what we want, we cannot let her go."

The Doctor stepped close to Miranda, his face very close to hers. "If she dies, then all of you die," he threatened.

"It will not come to that if the Traveler helps us," Miranda replied.

The Doctor threw up his hands in the air. "I can't, I'm telling you! The cracks in the universes have been sealed. Even if I could somehow generate the massive amount of power needed, there's no guarantee that everything wouldn't come crashing apart. One small miscalculation could literally mean the end of reality!"

"That is a risk that we are willing to take," Miranda told him.

"No, there has to be some way you can adapt to living here, some better way," the Doctor argued, pacing, rubbing the back of his neck. "How did you survive when you first got here? Before you starting using human bodies as hosts? There had to be some kind of transitional period."

"The Letrion live in the dark and the damp, in the cracks and depths of things," Miranda answered.

"Sounds like a breeze, can't imagine why you'd…"

It hit him. He stopped pacing. He knew what the Letrion were.

"Mold," the Doctor said quietly to himself. He turned to Miranda.

"You're mold," he said, louder this time.

Miranda's body did not respond.

The Doctor started pacing again. "It said in the reports that this facility got a sudden case of mold. Black mold! And now you've moved on from the damp and the cracks and the walls to flesh and blood human bodies—"

He ran his hands through his hair, his mind racing wildly. "Of course!" he shouted. "Reports of mold and new paint!"

He whooped out loud, very, very pleased with himself. "Telepathic killer mold from outer space, now that's a new one even for me! New new Doctor, indeed!"

"The Traveler must help us now," Miranda growled, stepping towards the Doctor. "The Traveler promised."

The Doctor let his hands fall from his hair. "Yeah...about that," he started, twisting his mouth a bit. He scrunched up his nose. "I lied."

And he took off running.

He knew what he had to do now. He just hoped that Rose would hang on long enough.

* * *

Rose sprang backward from the cot, her heart thudding frantically in her chest. "Get back!" she said to Greg. She pulled him back with her.

Jared stood up from his cot. His face broke into a big, feral grin.

"Look, it's not that bad," Greg said. "Clearly I overreacted, just because I can't detect a heartbeat, that doesn't mean—"

"It's not Jared anymore," Rose told him. "Something's got him."

"Yes, we were hoping it would take you a little bit longer to figure that out," Jared mused. "Doesn't really matter, though. We will have what we want soon enough, one way or the other."

"What do you want?" Rose demanded.

"To go home," spoke the thing that used to be Jared.

"Okay, well, where is home?" Rose asked. "Maybe I can help you."

"Or maybe we'll make a new home right here," Jared said. He smiled a nasty smile and his teeth glittered with black. "Would you like to help us with that?"

"What's wrong with him? Why's he talking like that?" Greg asked.

Rose stepped in front of him, her body a protective shield. "I can help you if you'll let me, but you can't kill anyone else," she told Jared.

"Oh, we can do pretty well as we like," Jared told her.

Then he snapped back his head and his eyes rolled back in his sockets as he let out a bloodcurdling screech.

* * *

Miranda stood where the Doctor had left her, her head tilted back, her eyes fluttering in her skull, her borrowed voice screaming.

_He has betrayed us_, she told her brethren silently, but her mouth-cry echoed in the halls, pierced eardrums, rattled windows. Everyone who heard it clamped their hands over their ears, looking around fearfully for the source of the shrill animal shriek, a sound like metal scraping against metal in a storm, a sound like something dying horribly.

_Kill the girl. Kill the Rose._

_Take them all._

* * *

"New rules," Jared panted.

He pushed past Rose, strong once again, and grasped Greg by the throat, thrusting him upward. Rose ran at him but he flung her aside into the opposite wall, threw her as easily as if she were a doll.

"What—" Greg choked out, fingers scrabbling uselessly against Jared's grip.

"Don't worry," Jared assured him. "We'll do our best to make you comfortable."

He spewed a high-pressure shower of oily black fluid into Greg's face.

Greg cried out in pain, his hands clawing at eyes. Jared dropped him and moved toward the door.

"Time to spread," he said. "If we cannot go home, we will make a new one here. And we each of us need a place to live."

He jerked his head at the sudden shrill sound of a fire alarm. He whirled around to see Rose slumped against the far wall, her hand just falling from the fire alarm lever.

"Oops," she said mockingly.

Outside the room Rose heard the sounds of a mass exit, nurses calling for order. The door opened. There stood the lady nurse from before.

"Sorry loves, sounds like we need to—"

"No! Get out!" Rose cried, pulling herself up to a standing position.

The nurse noticed Greg on the floor. "What happened here?" she asked, moving to help him.

"Greg's not quite feeling himself," Jared said, stepping in front of the nurse.

He spewed his black fluid into her face. Rose watched in horror as the nurse fell down beside Greg, screaming and writhing in pain.

Jared cracked his neck and walked over the bodies, moving toward the door. But before he could take another step, Greg grabbed him around the ankles and pulled him down to the ground. He jammed a needleful of something into Jared's leg.

"Run now," Greg rasped to Rose. His face was covered in black fluid and Rose watched, breath caught in her throat, as his eyes slowly turned dark, ink bleeding onto wet paper. Jared spasmed violently in his grasp.

"Run!" Greg shouted.

Rose bolted for the door, forcing her heavy limbs to move. She leapt over the pile of bodies, catching her injured foot on one of them. She swore, recovered, and ran through sickbay until she caught up to a handful of employees crowding into the stairwell.

"Go! You've got to go!" she urged the wall of people. "It's right behind us! GO!"

One of the employees pointed behind Rose and let out a scream.

Rose glanced back. Jared loomed in the doorway, covered in black fluid as thick as petroleum. Rose turned to face him.

"Just take me," she told Jared, spreading her arms out to shield the people behind her. "I'll come over willingly if you let everyone else go!"

"How generous," Jared said, his eyes lazily scanning over the crowd before they settled on Rose. "But you already belong to us. It is only a matter of time now before you are completely ours."

He started walking toward her.

Rose could hear the people behind her pushing each other in an effort to get away. Jared approached her until he stood very close, his face just a few inches from hers. His eyes clouded until they were fully black. When he exhaled, the air reeked of death.

Even though she was trembling violently, Rose didn't budge.

"We need more," Jared whispered in her face.

"Bit greedy, that," a voice chirped up from behind Jared. It was the new Doctor.

_About damn time_, Rose thought.

"The Traveler," Jared hissed.

"Yep, that'd be me," the Doctor said cheerfully, his hands clasped behind his back. "I just needed to get a quick message to Rose there, if you don't mind."

"And what would that be?" Jared asked.

The Doctor grinned. "Duck."

Rose fell to the ground as the Doctor whipped a spray bottle from behind his back and hit Jared in the face with something liquid. Both Jared's screams and a foul smell filled the air. The last of the small crowd behind Rose pushed their way into the stairwell, a few of them glancing back in shock at the display in the hall. Jared's body fell to the ground with a thud, twitching, black and clear fluid pooling beneath him.

"Ugh, is that bleach?" Rose asked, trying not to gag on the stench.

The Doctor stepped over Jared's body and helped Rose off the floor. "Industrial strength," he responded. "We're not dealing with a virus or contagion, it's a parasitic telepathic mold species called the Letrion. It latched onto us when we came back in the TARDIS—remind me to ask them later how they managed surviving in the Void, impressive is what that is—and what better way to get rid of mold?" he asked, shaking the spray bottle.

Rose nodded. "Great. At least now I know what's killing me."

The Doctor looked her over. "How are you doing? Are you all right?" he asked. He cupped Rose's chin in his free hand, gently tilting her head this way and that as he inspected her.

She forced herself not to jump when his thumb brushed against her lower lip. That was accidental, Rose was sure; she told herself that this was a purely clinical gesture. She caught his gaze and saw the concern in his eyes and looked away again, and reminded herself that sometimes, he really was just a doctor; all good doctors are concerned about their patients, aren't they? She ignored the warmth that spread out from where his fingertips touched her, ignored the blush she could feel creeping into her cheeks, and noted that it was probably just a side effect of the contagion. The killer mold thing. That's what this was all about.

She wasn't half-tempted to pull away, but found herself unable, somehow.

"They gave me a shot to slow it down," Rose said, looking at her hands instead of his face, "But I don't think I've got long."

She showed him her hand and arm, the network of black veins even more visible now than before.

The Doctor took her hand in his and grimaced at the sight.

"I'm going to stop this, Rose," he told her, his dark eyes flashing. "I promise."

_I promise._

Rose felt like she might choke. She pulled back from him, shaking her head in disbelief. Her hand slipped from his grasp.

"Rose?" the Doctor asked, confused.

A sound at the back of the hallway made them both jump. Three darkened figures stood there, Miranda and the bodies of two others. The dead patients slowly started down the hallway, creeping toward the Doctor and Rose, a trio of dark-stained zombies shuffling through the shadows.

"Quickly," the Doctor said to Rose. "Have you noticed any 'fresh paint signs' in the building recently?"

"I don't know—why?"

"Because I sort of glazed over that part of the report. Any fresh paint, anywhere? It's important!"

"Erm—"

Rose's mind raced as she and the Doctor backed away from the approaching corpses. "The lobby, I think," she said. "And maybe the women's loo on the thirteenth floor?"

"Right. Brilliant. Take this." The Doctor pushed the spray bottle of bleach into Rose's hands.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"To the lobby and the women's loo on the thirteenth floor. Good luck!"

The Doctor took off. Rose turned and faced the three dead people ambling closer.

With a pang, she recognized Greg and the female nurse, their faces streaked with dark tears, their eyes now black.

"Right then," Rose sighed, raising the spray bottle. "Come and get it."

* * *

Oliver stood outside the Torchwood building, drumming his fingers against his arm, bristling against the nervous throng of employees crowded around the entrance. First a quarantine, now an evacuation? Something fishy was happening on the inside, something very fishy indeed, and he was quickly growing tired of waiting for the police and fire department to show up.

The last few employees filtering outside of Canary Wharf were jabbering some nonsense about zombies. _Tripe_, Oliver thought to himself. _Pure, unadulterated tripe_. He may have seen some strange things in his time at Torchwood, and he may be able to digest the thought of a killer virus or whatever the nurses were chittering about, but zombies were a thing from the movies, and bad movies at that. Himself, he much preferred a good, solid historical drama or war film, none of this science-fiction nonsense. Things at Torchwood were strange enough without people exaggerating the truth.

"He was covered all over in this black stuff," one employee told her coworkers as she trembled and shook. "Tyler actually went toe-to-toe with him!"

_Of course_, Oliver thought. _Of course Rose Tyler is involved_.

"Now what's this about Tyler?" he asked gruffly. "What's she got into now?"

The employee shrugged her shoulders, still shaking. "I don't know, she told us all to run, some bloke showed up and made it sound like he was going to fix everything!"

"Some bloke, eh?" Oliver asked, distracted as movement inside the building caught his eye. He peered through the large sliding glass doors, straining to figure out what bloody idiot might still be inside the building.

Well, well. If it wasn't "some bloke" himself running around the lobby right now, acting a right fool, touching the walls everywhere, and—what was that? Did he just lick one of the walls? And then make a face, and lick the wall again?

"Oh, good grief," Oliver mumbled to himself.

"Looks like we might have another one," he told a nearby nurse. He watched the man that Rose called "the Doctor" as he felt along the walls some more, pressed his ear up against one of them as if listening for something.

"At least, I hope that's what's wrong with him," Oliver muttered.

He swiped his security card and unlocked the doors, opening them just wide enough to let his large frame inside. "Oi, you," he called to the Doctor. "What are you—"

"Oliver! Be a good chap, turn off that alarm, would you?" the Doctor called to him. "And you may as well call off the fire and police, there's no need for them here."

When Oliver didn't move, the Doctor made an impatient gesture with his hands. "Sooner would be better than later," he said. "There's no fire and I can't hear anything with all of the noise."

Oliver blinked in surprise, but went ahead and pulled out his phone, entering an override code. He was not at all shocked that there was not actually a fire in the building, not when he knew from years of experience that this was Tyler's preferred method of emptying the facility's population for one reason or another. At this point, Tyler and the fire alarm were practically Torchwood's very own version of The Girl Who Cried Wolf.

It was certainly a relief when the klaxons finally turned off. "And what exactly are you trying to hear?" Oliver asked the Doctor.

"Telepathic killer mold parasites living in the walls," the Doctor stated without a shred of humor. "The building's infested with them."

"Right," Oliver said, brow furrowed. "I think you've had a bit of a nasty shock or something, mate."

"Nope, that's what's happening right now, you've got a flock of interdimensional hitchhikers from hell ready to destroy and consume everything in their path, and the more you argue with me about it, the more people are going to die," the Doctor told him.

He felt along the wall and pressed his ear to it again. He rapped his knuckles against the smooth white surface and made a face—apparently he wasn't finding what he was looking for. "Rose is up there right now fending off about three of them, keeping them from spreading any further," he continued. "That's three of your dead employees being controlled by the mold parasites. Now do you want more to die, or do you want to help me?"

Oliver thought for a moment. This man was clearly mad, clearly very mad. He had the eyes of a wild thing.

Rose Tyler had those eyes sometimes. Oliver wasn't sure if that counted as an endorsement or not.

He grumbled to himself. Killer zombies, indeed. Apparently things at Torchwood really were that strange.

"What do you need me to do?"

* * *

The dead nurse dropped at Rose's feet, shrieking, her face contorted like a grotesque rubber Halloween mask. Rose gagged on the stench of bleach but still stood her ground.

One down, two to go.

Miranda and Greg stood a good distance away, far enough that Rose could not reach them with the spray bottle. She was running dangerously low anyway.

And she was warm, very very warm, and very tired...

"Greg," Rose said feebly to Greg's lumbering body, "I don't suppose there's any bit of you left. But if there is...I'm sorry this happened to you."

"It will not be long now," Miranda told her. "Soon, the pain will be gone, and you will be one of us."

"What do you think I am, stupid?" Rose asked, her arms trembling even under the light weight of the spray bottle. "It won't be me, it will just be my body. I'll be dead."

"Yes," Miranda said softly. "But the Miranda is still here. She lives on through us, in a way. We hear her thoughts. We see her memories. We see..."

Miranda's head tilted back; her eyes lolled in their sockets. "When are Mum and Dad coming home?" Miranda asked, in what sounded like her normal voice, and Rose cringed. "I don't understand. They just went out for a drive. They've only been gone a little while..."

"Stop it," Rose demanded.

"I don't want to go to Grandmum's, I want to go home..."

"Stop it!" Rose cried. "Those memories aren't yours to take!"

Miranda's head tilted back forward, her black eyes boring into Rose. "And what about your memories, then?"

"The signal grows stronger," Greg agreed. "Our hive-mates inside, they're awakening again, moving again. Can't you feel it? Going to hollow you out," he whispered nastily. "Already we can see...everything."

All the air left Rose's lungs. A sudden white-hot burst of pain surged through her. Something in her skull, clawing around, ripping, tearing—and her veins, her entire body, it was all on fire—she could feel something moving inside her brain and her nervous system, boiling, dissolving, screaming—she cried out in pain—

Rose gasped. She was on the floor. When had that happened?

A tiny pool of black fluid was right underneath her. Her nose had started bleeding the black stuff. It irritated the edges of her nostrils. She wiped her face to get the burning fluid away.

Greg stood over her. "So lonely," Miranda said from seemingly far away. Greg crouched down so that his face was level with Rose's, examining her with an intense, wide-eyed curiosity, unblinking, an owl gauging its mousey prey. His black eyes glimmered dully under the flickering fluorescents. Rose clumsily scooted away from him.

"So, so lonely," Miranda intoned. There was almost a hint of—was that pity in her voice?

"The Letrion have never truly known loneliness until now," Miranda said. "So many left back home. So many more. We miss them. We do not understand how you live this way. Having so few people. Being so far away. Being so alone. It must be terrible."

"I'm not alone," Rose panted. "I have my mum, and Pete, and Tony. I'm never alone."

"So many lonely hours, working and hoping, and trying and praying," Miranda mused. "No use praying. The gods never listen."

"The Traveler and his companion, torn asunder," Greg said. "Nothing else can fill the space. Not mothers nor fathers nor brothers nor friends. Love and family, but not everything you want. Still something missing. Nights and weeks and months and years of working your fingers to the bone, and you still feel alone. Gods and ghosts. How do you live like this?"

"Please stop," Rose pleaded.

"But he's not quite right, is he? The Traveler," Greg's corpse said. "This...Doctor."

The pain began building up in Rose's skull again. She could feel the black fluid pulsing out of her nose now. Her breathing became labored. She clutched her chest in pain.

"Perhaps this is why he cannot help us. Because he is not the true one. He is a lie. Isn't that right?" Miranda asked. "This Traveler, this Doctor, is a walking, breathing lie. A shadow. A broken promise. No wonder you're so alone."

Rose screwed her eyes closed against the pain and the rasping sound of Miranda's voice.

"We can take that away," Greg told her. "Take away the pain and the loneliness. We are so many, so very many, you will never feel lonely again. Let us help you. Let us welcome you. Everything that you are will live on through us."

"Just surrender," Miranda whispered. "You do not need the Doctor. You do not need the lie."

Rose struggled to open her eyes. "Maybe..."

Greg leaned in closer to hear her better.

"...a lie is better than nothing."

She emptied the spray bottle into the corpse's face.


	6. Chapter 6

Oliver wished, not for the first time, that he had called in to work that morning. He had awoken with a smidgen of a headache, after all. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable reason to stay home, and a much better alternative to hunting for killer telepathic mold in the women's loo.

"I don't understand. If it was really just mold, then the bleach should have killed it," Oliver said. He held onto a large empty marmalade pot (wondering, not for the first time, how, where, and when the Doctor had procured it) while the Doctor scraped away at the wall with an abandoned painter's tool. "That's what bleach does. It kills mold. So this stuff can't be mold. It's got to be some kind of alien virus or something," Oliver insisted.

"You didn't kill it, but you did weaken it," the Doctor said, scraping through layers of paint. "Once the hive mind was threatened, it started to expand, sending foot soldiers out in search of a new place to live, a place they could more easily defend. Couldn't risk getting bleached and painted over again, you see. And after sensing all of the people passing through here, what better host could they think of than a warm, moving, human body?"

He let out a grunt at a particularly stubborn bit of paint. "So the hive mind sends out a sort of reconnaissance team, if you will, and their job is to determine which bodies would make suitable hosts for everyone in the hive."

"And they do that by?"

"They're telepathic, remember?"

"Ah, of course," Oliver said, rolling his eyes. "However could I forget?"

"Anyway," the Doctor continued as if he hadn't heard Oliver, "I figured the bleach would work on the foot soldiers, the members of the group that physically possessed Rose and your employees. They're a little weaker, being so far away from the core group. But when dealing with the core group, with the actual hive mind, you need to use something a bit stronger."

He paused. "I reckon you just really ticked the hive mind off."

"And...the hive mind is living underneath the paint, in the women's loo?" Oliver asked dubiously, looking around the pale grey stalls. He felt more than a little silly standing in there with a marmalade pot while the Doctor stood on a toilet and chipped away at the back wall.

"Mold likes to live in damp places. Where do you find mold? The toilet."

"Yes, but how do you know for certain that this is the hive mind?" Oliver asked.

"Educated guess. And some interminably boring interdepartmental memos about maintenance and fresh paint jobs. About as fascinating as—well, as watching paint dry, really."

The Doctor stopped. "Ah. See, there it is."

Oliver leaned in close. Certain enough, there was a large black spot on the wall, dark and ominous underneath the fresh white paint. Oliver swore he could see it growing right before his eyes. His jaw dropped. "We just had it removed," he said. "Bloody ineffective cleaners, they'd better give us a refund is all I have to say."

Then he panicked. "Wait—how are you certain we won't get contaminated, right here and now?"

"I'm not," the Doctor said firmly. "Hand me the pot."

Oliver complied, but he wasn't happy about it. He leaned out of the stall a little bit, peeking at the exit longingly.

"If we can take out the hive mind, that should eliminate the remaining foot soldiers as well," the Doctor was saying. "They can't survive without the rest of the hive." He scraped bits of drywall and black mold into the pot.

Oliver wrinkled his nose at the black stuff quietly _plink, plink, plinking_ against the glass. This was easily the nastiest bloody thing he'd ever encountered in a marmalade pot.

"And the whole hive mind, or home base, or whatever, the whole thing's going to fit in here?" he asked, eying both the wall and the pot.

"Ah, don't be fooled by its surface area. It's mold, not jam. It doesn't take up a lot of volume. Not until it's expanded inside a living host, anyway."

Oliver looked at the ever-filling jar, shuddered, and swore to never touch marmalade again.

"And how do you plan to kill it?" he prodded.

"Thought I'd take it down to your evil secret lab and see what you've got," the Doctor replied. "Any suggestions?"

Oliver thought for a moment. "I might have a few ideas," he said.

* * *

Rose huddled in the corner of the hallway, forcing herself to breathe. Greg's corpse stunk in front of her. Miranda stood over him, regarding his body with an almost curious stare.

Rose lifted the spray bottle. It was empty.

Miranda shook her head. "We don't know why you would do that," she said. "You are going to die anyway. Killing our hive-mates will not change your fate."

"Yeah, well..." Rose gasped. "Human beings don't really like it when something tries to kill them. We're...funny that way."

"We are only trying to survive," Miranda told her. "We tried living in the walls and the dark places, cut off from our family hive, our brothers and sisters back home. We did not harm anyone, and your kind tried to kill us. And they did. They killed so many of us with their chemicals and weapons and their fire."

Rose opened her mouth to speak, but fell silent. She suspected that the explanation of "Yes, but we get rid of mold all the time" wouldn't fare so well.

"Your kind has the ultimate power in this world. If we cannot go home, we need bodies like yours to survive. What would you have done in our place?" Miranda's body asked.

Rose thought for a moment, panting for breath. She felt bad for these creatures. She really did. She knew what it was like to be cut off from the world and the life she knew. But she couldn't condone their actions, no matter how sympathetic she may feel.

Miranda and Jared and Greg didn't deserve to die for them.

"I would have found another way," she said obstinately. She could feel her heart slowing. It was very painful. Each word was a struggle.

"In fact..." she said, even as she realized it was true, "I still can."

"Empty words," Miranda spat.

She jerked her head to the side, as if hearing something, something far away. Her dark eyes widened and her mouth tensed. She did not like what she heard. Miranda let out another one of her unearthly screams.

"Broken promises and lies," Miranda's body hissed, her head snapping back toward Rose. "Your precious Traveler-Doctor is planning to kill us all right now!"

"He wouldn't do that," Rose insisted. "That's not his way."

"But we can see the truth beyond that," Miranda told her. "We can see the truth in your mind. This is not the Traveler you knew. This is something different. He will not help us. He will kill us all."

She stopped.

"Unless we kill him first."

* * *

"Our laboratory has some of the most advanced scientific and military equipment on Earth," Oliver explained as he and the Doctor made their way down to the lab. "I don't know how well it holds up to—to—Time King technology or what have you, but it's pretty good stuff."

"Time—what?" the Doctor asked as they ran down the stairs.

"Time King, isn't that what you are?"

"Time Lord, I'm a Time _Lord_," the Doctor shot back. "'Time King'," he muttered derisively.

Oliver huffed. "Well excuse me if my brain is a bit too occupied at the moment to remember something like that. It's not every day I deal with killer alien fungus, you know."

"Pretty typical day for me. This it, then?" the Doctor asked as they landed outside a plain white door on the lowest level of the building. "Bit underwhelming, isn't it?"

"Sorry it fails to impress," Oliver said, rolling his eyes. "If we'd known you'd be dropping by, maybe we'd have put up a banner or something."

He pulled out his keycard and swiped it. The door slid open. He and the Doctor stepped inside.

The Doctor let out a low whistle.

While the outside was nothing special, the laboratory itself was a scientist's dream. Even with most of the lights out, the Doctor could see a vast room in chrome and white, stretching out for what seemed like an impossibly long distance, full of projects upon projects awaiting completion. He walked between the tables, looking over pads of paper covered in hastily scribbled notes, a magnetics project that was easily 98% complete even if its scientist didn't know it, and tablets screens frozen on scenes of computer-generated project simulations; he noticed that one of the scenes bore the initials "LR", and wondered if Luke Rattigan worked for Torchwood in this universe. He saw nanotech and biospheres and gravitrons and machinery in various states of assemblage on stainless steel tables, lying next to beakers and vials and glass globes full of all sorts of fascinating liquids and gases, everything separated by fancy clear boards covered in equations and theories and diagrams.

"Not bad," he said in approval. "Got a few years to go before you solve the Hellfire Paradigm, but really, otherwise, not bad."

He glanced back at Oliver. "How did you know I'm a Time Lord, anyway?" he asked.

"All Torchwood agents are required to divulge any information about alien contact before they start working here," Oliver explained. "Tyler told us about her travels with you. Said some pretty impressive stuff. Quite frankly, that's the only reason I'm going along with whatever potty plan you've got going, is based on her stories about you."

"Ah. So what else did she say about me? Anything good?" the Doctor asked with a twinkling smile.

Oliver cleared his throat in response.

"Right! Priorities, end of humanity and all that. So what do you have in here that can kill killer mold?"

"We have a few things in the classified department," Oliver said. He gestured to a door marked "Clearance One Personnel Only", next to a set of windows opening into a dark room. "It's all highly experimental, but I'm sure you'll find something. We have a world-class laser, strongest known one on Earth. There's also a cryo-chamber and a vibranium core and a miniature microwave reactor. Surely we've got something you can use."

Oliver swiped his card again, and the "Clearance One" door slid open.

The Doctor stood in the doorway, surveying the contents of the room. "Don't know about you, but I feel like that laser is looking pretty good," he said.

He and Oliver stepped inside the chamber.

Inside the dark outer room, something moved.

* * *

"Please, I'm begging you, just let us help," Rose pleaded with the Miranda, or rather the creature inside her. "You don't need to kill anyone else."

"Like Rose and the Traveler and the others here killed us?"

Rose winced. "That was different, we didn't understand. But now I do. And I can help you."

Miranda shook her head. "We've heard that before. The Traveler-Doctor promised to help. And now he's planning to destroy us. You are lying just as he was."

"He doesn't lie," Rose said, fully knowing that this wasn't true.

Miranda laughed. "Oh, poor child!" she said. "Poor, stupid child. The Traveler _is_ a lie! His entire existence! You forget, as the end approaches, as your shell is hollowed to make room for us, we can see everything inside your mind. We see the true Traveler leaving you behind, leaving you with this duplicate, this shadow, this poor facsimile of himself. We see your thoughts and hear your feelings. We know _everything_."

"Then know this!" Rose gasped. She tried to stand up, but could not. She slumped back against the wall. "If you know everything going on inside my head, know this: _I'm_ not lying. I will help you, if you'll just let me. He might not do anything for you, but I will. I promise."

Miranda stared at her. Rose couldn't tell what she was thinking, if anything.

Rose closed her eyes. "I promise," she said. A grey tear slid down her cheek. "I promise."

Silence.

After a few moments, Rose opened her eyes. Miranda was standing very close to her now. Her hand extended outward to Rose.

Rose blinked the grey tears away, confused.

"We...believe you," Miranda said.

* * *

"The laser will take several minutes to charge," Oliver explained as he initiated the start-up sequence. He flipped switches and hit keys on the console of the gigantic laser, a monolithic silver cannon-shaped thing. A hum filled the room, growing louder as the weapon powered up, buzzing like a nest full of bees. The sound sent tiny vibrations through the air and set the Doctor's teeth on edge.

"It's a pretty damn powerful thing," Oliver noted over the noise.

"You said it can incinerate just about anything?" the Doctor asked. Oliver nodded. "That should be good enough, then. Except you look nervous," the Doctor said. "Should we be nervous?"

"Well of course we should be cautious, everything in here is highly experimental," Oliver said. "For all we know, anything in here could blow up in our faces."

The Doctor clapped him on the shoulder. "Well that just makes it fun! Now where's the pot?"

Oliver handed the marmalade pot to him, his face incredulous. "You're a bit barmy, you are," he told the Doctor.

The Doctor nodded, grinning like a madman.

He placed the jar in the laser cannon's line of fire. "That's it, then," the Doctor said. "I guess all we do now is—"

Something caught his eye.

"Run!" he shouted.

Oliver turned around to see a very dead person in a HAZMAT suit in front of him. The dead person opened his mouth.

"What—"

"Run!"

The Doctor just barely managed to pull Oliver aside before a stream of black shot out of the corpse's mouth, burning a hole through his mask. A few droplets of it caught Oliver on his arm and the side of the face.

"Christ!" Oliver shouted, pulling his hand up to his cheek. He frantically wiped off the fluid with his jacket sleeve.

The Doctor stood and faced the dead body. "You can kill us, but you've only got about two minutes before your entire species fries," he informed the walking cadaver, pointing to the marmalade pot perched on the laser table. "So what's it going to be? Will your last act be one of acceptance or useless violence?"

The dead body opened its mouth again, a gurgling sound rising up in its throat. Black liquid welled up in its mouth.

The Doctor took a step back, found himself stuck between the dead body and the gigantic laser gun.

"Useless violence it is, then," he muttered. He held up both hands and waited for the dead body to strike.

"Wait! Hive-mate, hold your venom!"

The Doctor looked up. Another dead body stood back in the laboratory—Miranda again. Rose was with her.

"Rose, get back!" the Doctor shouted. "There's a—"

"I know," Rose said, with a voice like sandpaper. "She's with me."

"She's —" the Doctor faltered. "She's what, now?"

Rose nodded toward Miranda wordlessly. Miranda and the other dead body stood very near each other, their respective sets of eyelids fluttering as they communicated with their minds. The Doctor looked from them back to Rose.

She stepped into the light, and his breath hitched in his throat at the sight of her. A network of dark veins was just barely visible at her temples and the inside of her wrists, and tiny grey trails marked her cheeks where tears had gone down. She looked awful, pale and tired and wan, as if every expansion of her lungs caused her pain. Even though the serum had bought her more time, as the Doctor had hoped, that time was now running out, draining right in front of him.

Rose didn't have long before the things inside her fully awoke and took over. They could only put off their nature for so long.

She started to fall. The Doctor ran forward to catch her, and eased her onto the ground.

"Rose..."

"You can't kill them," Rose whispered.

That was a surprising development. And unsettling.

The Doctor shook his head. "I've got to," he reasoned. "They're parasites. They'll keep going until there's nothing left."

"They're just trying to survive," Rose argued softly. "They can't get back home. They're desperate. Please don't do it."

"Don't you understand? I've got to do it. Otherwise, you'll..." the Doctor trailed off, swallowed loudly.

He wondered if the creatures inside Rose had tainted her thoughts somehow, were holding her hostage, had already won. Wondered if it was Rose talking to him now, or the things inside.

"I can't lose you again, Rose," he told her, and anger welled up in him at the thought of it. He shook his head. "I won't do it. I won't let that happen. I just won't."

The laser's hum grew louder as it finished powering up. "Doctor, the laser is ready," Oliver called from the restricted access room. "Should I initiate?"

"The Rose promised the Traveler would help," Miranda hissed. The other dead body, the silent feral one in the HAZMAT suit, stepped toward Oliver. Oliver backed up against the far wall, glanced between the Doctor and the two dead bodies, waiting for the Doctor to act.

"The Doctor I knew would give them a chance," Rose said.

"Doctor?" Oliver asked nervously. The feral body continued making its way toward him. "Doctor!"

"Doctor, please." Rose grasped his hand.

The Doctor hesitated.

"I'm going to initiate!" Oliver shouted. He smacked the big green button on the side. The laser made a whirring sound as it prepared to focus its beam.

The Doctor couldn't look away from Rose's face. Her eyes were screwed shut, eyebrows knit together in pain, sweat beading over her forehead in grey droplets. These creatures were causing her so much pain, he thought.

And yet...

He noticed the TARDIS key hanging around Rose's neck. She was holding his hand very tightly.

"No," the Doctor said. He turned to Oliver. "No! Stop it! Deactivate the laser!"

"Are you mad?" Oliver shouted, backing away from the feral corpse. "They're trying to kill us!"

"They're trying to live! And l promised I would help them."

He looked back at Rose. "I promised," he said to her.

The whirring sounds of the laser grew even louder. The Doctor leapt forward and pulled the plug from the wall. The laser powered down.

"Well, now what are we going to do?" Oliver said loudly in the now-silence. The feral zombie continued to lumber toward him. "Come on! Help me think of something!" Oliver demanded of the Doctor.

"Make him stop!" the Doctor shouted at Miranda, but she shook her head.

"Our hive-mates are silent," she said. "They are not listening to the hive. We cannot reason with them. They will not stop."

The Doctor's mind raced frantically. His thoughts darted from Oliver, to Rose, to the killer mold that would certainly destroy them both in a few moments. If only he had something to stop them, if only he could just freeze them in their tracks somehow, if only—

He blinked. Oh, he could be so stupid sometimes.

"Oi!" he said, waving his arms. "Hey! You in the suit!"

The wild corpse slowly turned away from Oliver to glare at him.

"Look what I've got," the Doctor said, grabbing the marmalade pot. "Recognize anyone here?"

The feral cadaver paused for a moment, as if deliberating. Then it followed after him.

"Good, that's right! After me! Allons-y!" the Doctor laughed. He ran through the restricted chamber, the wild corpse trailing after, gaining in speed. "Good boy!" the Doctor applauded.

"What's he doing?" Oliver asked, darting over to Rose where she lay.

She smiled a little bit. "He's just being the Doctor," she said. She closed her eyes as consciousness left her.

Inside the restricted room, the Doctor found himself at a bit of a dead end. He turned to face his pursuer, his back pressed up against the wall.

"Just you and me then, eh?" he said. "I hope you're glad that someone I care about put in a good word for you. If it had been up to me, you all would have burned."

The feral zombie approached, opened its mouth. The Doctor felt around on the wall behind his back.

"But I guess I can settle for the opposite," he said. He found a button and slammed it.

A door behind him slid open and he jumped to the side just in time for the dead body to come barreling through. He hit the button again before the body had a chance to recover and escape, sliding the marmalade pot in through the gap between the wall and the closing door. It flew in, just barely in time. The door closed with a great _clunk_ sound.

The Doctor could see the corpse through a small window in the door, roaming around the chamber, hitting the wall as if it could break through. The body beat its fists uselessly against the white inside of the room.

"This is me keeping my promise," the Doctor said.

He entered a few digits on a keypad and hit the go button. He watched as the room was flooded with a white mist. He listened as the corpse screamed and screamed its terrible animal howl. And after several futile windmilling attempts to fight the cold, its body moving slower and slower all the while, the wild corpse screeched its last.

* * *

Oliver looked up to see Miranda clutching her hands to her head, shrieking.

"What's going on?" he demanded. "What is it?"

Miranda fell to her knees. "Mum and Dad are..." she said. The black veins in her face and arms faded; the black liquid in her eyes cleared up.

"…Cold," she finished.

She fell over. She did not move again.

* * *

The Doctor waited a prudent amount of time before turning off the cryo-chamber. When several moments had passed, enough time to ensure that anything living had been completely and utterly frozen, he opened the door again.

The once-wild corpse lay on the floor in a fetal position, the marmalade pot clenched in its hands. Both were covered in a thick layer of frost. The Doctor knelt down to inspect the body and the pot it was trying to protect, his breath hanging white in the air behind him.

He shuddered in the cold. This new human body was bollocks at regulating its temperature.

"I will help you," he said to the corpse. "Rose was right. You were just trying to survive. But you can't live here. I'll find you a new home someday. Maybe when the new TARDIS is up and running."

He thought of the coral in his pocket, felt calm and assured.

"I'll find you a new home. And that is a promise."

He left the chamber and closed the door behind him, making sure to set the temperature at a nice amount of freezing. No reason to risk it.

"You'll need an extraction team in there ASAP to make sure that body and that pot are stored properly," the Doctor announced to Oliver as he re-entered the laboratory. He stopped and watched Rose's prone figure for any signs of life. Oliver was sitting next to her, having folded his suit jacket into a pillow under her head.

Rose was not moving.

"And how is she?" the Doctor asked, forcing his voice to sound casual.

Oliver shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "All the black stuff is gone. She looks normal now. But she hasn't, you know...I don't know how much it had got to her."

The Doctor crouched down next to them, pressed his fingers gently against Rose's neck, feeling for a pulse.

"What did you do back there?" Oliver asked.

The Doctor ignored him for a moment, still feeling for Rose's heartbeat. Eventually, he found it—it was thready, weaker than he'd like, but any pulse was better than no pulse. He lifted up her hand and inspected it—no black anywhere. He let out a sigh he didn't know he was holding in.

The Doctor realized he was running his thumb over the soft, smooth underside of her wrist. He stopped. Even though it still felt like second nature—her hand in his, his arm linked round hers, their fingers intertwined, her cheek on his shoulder—she wouldn't like it, he thought. Not right now. Not from him.

He swallowed. That was hard to take.

"Froze them," he said eventually, once he remembered that Oliver had asked him a question. "Froze them until I can find them a new home. I figured the foot soldiers would sense the distress and run back to the hive mind in the pot, to try and protect them." He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling very tired all of a sudden. "Unfortunately it was too late to save the other infected hosts. They were dead by the time the parasites left. But the bodies should at least be safe to bury now."

He shuddered as he pressed his finger's to Rose's temples, willing her to awaken. "Their families can see them without the fear of being contaminated. They can mourn properly, if there is such a thing," he continued.

"And what about Agent Tyler?" Oliver asked. "Will...will we need to contact her family, too?"

At that moment, Rose's eyelids began to flutter.

The Doctor smiled. "I don't think we'll need to, no," he said.

Rose woke up with a gasp. Her eyes darted wildly about, unseeing.

"Doctor—"

"It's all right, Rose," the Doctor said. He helped her sit up. "I took care of it. They're going to be fine. Well, they might be a bit chilly, but they're going to be all right, in the end."

Rose nodded, running a hand through her hair, still a bit disoriented. "Thank you," she said.

The Doctor helped her onto her feet. "No, thank you," he said sincerely, pulling her into a tight hug without even thinking about it. She stiffened in the embrace, her own arms still limp down at her side, her shoulders raised just slightly, a subtle indication of her discomfort that only he would notice. The Doctor tried not to wince. Rose had never resisted a hug from him before. But after a moment she relaxed, wrapped her arms around him too, her fingers knotting themselves in the back of his suit jacket.

The Doctor smiled. Even when she hated him, Rose Tyler was still a very good hugger.

He held her out at arm's length. "You called me 'Doctor'," he teased.

Rose rolled her eyes. "Shut up."

"Never," the Doctor said with a wink.

He extended a hand to help Oliver off the floor. "Shall we go, then?" he asked his two companions, glancing at the lab space all about them. "Don't know about you two, but I'm a little tired of dark and damp places, myself."

"In a minute," Rose said. She walked over to Miranda's fallen form.

Poor Miranda. The Doctor's hands balled into fists. He hadn't been able to save her. He'd only been in this universe for one day, and already people had died because he hadn't moved fast enough, or thought fast enough, or acted fast enough. Now the world was needlessly missing one very kind-hearted dinner lady, and several other innocent people that didn't deserve to die so soon.

He could still feel the urge to make the Letrion pay for what they did to Miranda and the others. What they almost did to Rose. He felt the anger burning deep and hot in his chest.

He pushed it down and out of sight.

Rose stood for a moment, looking at Miranda's peaceful face, playing with the key around her neck. The Doctor wondered what she was thinking. Her face was impossible to read—which was a first for him, he realized with a pang.

She pulled the TARDIS key up and over her head. She held it in her palm, her eyes closed, her lips moving, as if in prayer. The key glinted brightly in the cold laboratory light. Rose opened her eyes and placed the key into one of Miranda's stiff, open hands.

"Wherever you are now, I hope you're not lonely anymore," the Doctor heard her whisper.

She turned back to Oliver and the Doctor. "All right," she said. "Let's get out of here."


	7. Chapter 7

Oliver staggered outside the building and took in a lungful of cool night air, grateful to have lungs that weren't filled with black fluid and a body that was his own.

He gazed up at the night sky—with all the light pollution mottling the air, it was impossible to tell, but the astronomy department had assured him that the stars had returned, twinkling up there somewhere. He squinted at the dull red hue overhead and resolved to take a better look when he got home, maybe haul the telescope up to the roof and sit looking up at the stars for a bit with Todd and a nice cuppa. Oh, that did sound heavenly.

Oliver turned at the sound of Rose and the Doctor following after him, the Doctor supporting Rose gently about her shoulders. As soon as they exited the lobby and walked out onto the street, however, Oliver noticed that Rose stepped away.

He wondered at that, but no matter, it wasn't any of his business.

"Most exciting work day I've had for a while," he said to no one in particular.

"I guess this is it, then," Rose said to Oliver. "For real this time."

"Yes, well," Oliver agreed. "I imagine you'll want to leave before the security detail tries to grill you about that little incident in the cafeteria."

Rose winced. "You heard about that, huh?"

Oliver nodded. "Oh, yes. I definitely heard about that."

He wanted to say a proper goodbye, but something had been nagging his brain for a while, and he imagined he should mention it before he forgot.

"There's just one thing I'm not sure of, though," Oliver said to the Doctor. "You say the mold came from another universe, hitched a ride through the Void on your ship thingummy, the TARGIS—"

"TARDIS," the Doctor corrected helpfully.

"—but if that's true, then how did the mold get here before you? The mold showed up before you did. Days before, actually. So how does that work?"

"Now that," the Doctor said, "Is a very good question." He scratched his chin as he thought. "It isn't as if the Letrion could have gotten here any other way, though. They must have snuck in under the TARDIS shields. And with the reality bomb bolloxing everything up, it's entirely possible that the Letrion fell back a few days. Quantum winds and temporal buffering and all that. The only other explanation is that someone else has a Void-safe vessel capable of interdimensional travel, but that sort of thing is impossible."

He considered. "It's a bit troublesome, actually," the Doctor finished thoughtfully. He clapped Oliver on the shoulder. "You might want to have a look into that. Again, good question, though!"

"And now I've got a damn big mess to clean up here," Oliver sighed in irritation. "Don't imagine you'd at least want to stick around long enough to clear up some of the details with Janice?" he asked Rose.

"You want to give me my job back?" she shot back.

"Ah." Oliver shook his head. "Sorry, Tyler. No can do. Orders from up high."

"Then no, not even a little bit," Rose replied flatly.

Oliver chuckled at that. "Can't say as I blame you," he told her.

He stuck out his hand again, this time for the Doctor to shake. "It was a pleasure working with you, Doctor," he said.

Then he thought about it. "Well, I wouldn't call it a pleasure per se, but it was certainly interesting, I'll give you that."

"I'll take it," the Doctor said with a grin, enthusiastically shaking Oliver's outstretched hand. "Rose was right, you're not so bad."

Oliver raised an eyebrow at that. Rose smiled a little sheepishly. Ah well, he should probably say something nice in response, the Doctor did just save them all, Oliver reasoned.

_The idiot_, he added. _The brilliant, barmy idiot_.

"Suppose you're not so bad yourself," Oliver admitted reluctantly.

"Oh, lovely!" the Doctor said. "I think that's the nicest thing I've heard all day."

"All right, it's definitely time to go," Rose said, suddenly awkward, but before she and the Doctor could leave, Oliver surprised her (and himself a bit) with a big bear hug.

"Oi now, that's unprofessional," Rose protested, but she hugged him back all the same.

"You look after that mad bloke, Tyler," Oliver said so that only she could hear. She didn't respond, though, just stood back and gave him another smile, one somehow a little emptier than the last.

"See you around sometime," Rose said before she and the Doctor took off. Oliver noticed that they were standing further apart than before.

Oliver couldn't help but wonder what all that was about.

* * *

"I didn't notice Pete had a guest home last time I was here," the Doctor mused aloud as he and Rose approached the cottage standing out behind Pete's mansion. "Funny, the things you overlook when you're being chased by a hoard of Cybermen, eh?"

"Yeah," Rose nodded in acknowledgement as she unlocked the front door and stepped in.

The Doctor waited outside for a moment, taking in the view. The property looked much the same way it had the last time he was here, even down to the mist in the grass, sparkling in the moonlight. It really was a nice estate, he had to admit, very lush and green, with Pete's grand (if a bit overdone) mansion off in the distance, and Rose's small (but cozy) little country cottage out in the back. Rose's cottage was a humble little thing built out of brick and stone, all grey and white and very late nineteenth-century, and the Doctor speculated that it had probably once been a caretaker's home. But he fully expected to go inside and find that Rose had made the place her own.

"I must say, I'm a little surprised that you don't have your own place," he called to her. "I mean, you know, your own-own place. Like a flat or something. But then again, your mum—"

He stopped in the doorway. Rose's family room, which he supposed normally looked somewhat normal, if a bit bland, was currently a huge jumbled mess with several packed bags sitting neatly in the middle of it.

"—has a bunch of parcels waiting like you're going to run away," the Doctor finished in a sentence that had somehow gotten away from him.

Rose fidgeted over at the edge of the room in response.

"What's this about, then?" the Doctor asked, nodding at the packed bags. "You going somewhere?"

"No," Rose replied. She wouldn't meet his gaze. "Do you want the tour before I kip off to bed?"

The Doctor eyed her suspiciously. She didn't want to talk about it, whatever it was. He could respect that. "Yeah, sure," he said.

"All right then. Kitchen is this way—"

"Nope, nope, I can't let it go," the Doctor interrupted. "Why do you have a bunch of packed bags sitting in your family room?"

Rose hesitated. "I forgot about them."

"You forgot about them?"

"When I hijacked the Dimension Cannon."

He didn't get it. "You packed bags...to hijack the Dimension Cannon?"

He could tell Rose was fighting the urge to roll her eyes at him. "I started doing jumps months ago, looking for home. Looking for a way to stop the stars going out," she explained. "Once I found the right reality, after we fixed everything, I was just gonna grab my bags and stay there. Then the holes between the universes started getting bigger, and the damage to reality was just getting worse and worse. But the thing is, the jumps are really expensive—even with the holes and tears in reality, the Cannon needs a hell of a lot of power to work properly. Each jump has to be specially approved. But when I saw the latest readings, I realized I didn't have time to wait for approval on another trip."

"So you hijacked the Cannon," the Doctor concluded. Rose nodded.

"And you forgot about...the bags," he continued as the truth dawned on him, "Bags full of clothes and toiletries and hair irons and things, for when you were back in the other universe. Back on the TARDIS."

"Everything happened so quickly," Rose said, laughing a bit, brushing her hair back behind one ear. "I forgot about the stupid bags. I was going to run off and travel through the universe with him with just the clothes on my back, just like the first time."

"Ah," the Doctor said.

"What?"

"Nothing." He put his hands in his pockets.

Rose waited impatiently.

"'Him'," the Doctor said after a moment. "Talking about 'him' again. We're the same person, Rose."

Rose's face went blank, her warm eyes now cool. "I want to believe it, but I just can't," she said, shrugging. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. You say you want to believe it. Just believe it. It's not that hard."

Rose raised an eyebrow, unconvinced.

"Look, I'm him, I'm everything he is," the Doctor tried. "Well, everything he is with an odd dash of Donna thrown in, but she's not that bad, I promise," he said with his usual boyish grin.

The attempted joke fell flat. Rose pursed her lips, unpersuaded.

The Doctor took a deep breath, perched himself on the arm of Rose's tastefully minimal, barely-sat-in sofa. He wondered about how little time she spent in her own home. "What do I have to do to convince you?" he asked, crossing his arms.

"Take me back. Take me back to the other universe," Rose said quietly.

The Doctor gave a curt laugh at that. "I literally just had this conversation," he said. "I can't do that. I can't take anyone home to their original universes. Not the Letrion, not me, not you. I'm sorry."

"Then tell me why he didn't want me," Rose replied, calm.

That took the Doctor by surprise. He opened his mouth, decided he didn't know what was going to come out of it, shut it again.

"You say you have all his memories. You say you think the way he does," Rose continued. "If you're really the same person, then tell me why he doesn't want me. Am I not—"

She faltered, looked down at her feet. "Am I not good enough for him anymore, or something like that?"

"What?" the Doctor snapped, one eyebrow arching high off his forehead. "Of course not, don't be—"

"And how long before I'm not good enough for you, either?" Rose pressed.

"Stop it. That's enough," the Doctor cut her off sharply. "That's preposterous. All of it. How can you even say such a thing?"

"Then what is it?" Rose asked, giving up, her arms flopping at her side. "Why did he leave me here?"

"We went over this on the beach," the Doctor said uneasily, scratching the back of his neck. Had she already forgotten that?

All of this talking made him intensely uncomfortable.

"Right," Rose said. "Because of you. But he didn't have to leave me here. He could have just left you."

Those words hit him harder than a slap in the face.

He thought for a moment. He thought perhaps he should leave it at that, let the discussion die, go back to the way things used to be when they never had to talk, and conversations were just for fun. He could change the topic, or make up some excuse to leave, or just plain storm away, like he used to after a scuffle on the TARDIS, particularly in his ninth incarnation. He'd grumble and stomp off in a rustle of leather and the clang of boots on the grating. Then, in the morning, she would always be bright-eyed and happy again. Rose never was very good at holding grudges, he remembered. It was one of the few things she couldn't accomplish. Well, that, and generally staying out of trouble.

All of his old instincts urged him to run. _Go, get out, leave before this gets messy_.

But something else compelled him to defend himself.

"That's a bit uncharitable, don't you think?" he argued finally. "Leaving me here, in a whole new universe, all by myself?"

"I don't care," Rose insisted, but the Doctor could tell she was lying, or at least, he hoped she was.

"You don't really mean that," he said.

"You don't—" Rose started to say loudly. The Doctor was taken aback at her outburst. Rose took in a deep breath.

"You have no idea…" she started, the words inching out slowly, painfully, between gritted teeth. The Doctor was struck by how worn she looked, by the forming tears sparkling at the edges of her eyes. But her face hardened, her weariness fading to dull anger. She furiously wiped the almost-tears away.

"You have no idea how hard I worked to get back to him," she told the Doctor. "First I slaved over that stupid Dimension Cannon for months. But I didn't know any of the maths, so I studied every day and every night until I did. Then after my team assembled it, we had weeks of test jumps. Weeks, and I'd do jumps almost every day. Do you know how hard that is? To make dozens of jumps between realities without the protection of something like the TARDIS?"

"Rose, that's terrible," the Doctor said, aghast. "Improperly shielded interdimensional travel is horribly unsafe, how could you—"

"Because I had to!" Rose cut him off with a near-shout. She let out a strangled laugh and her eyes went wild as she ran both fists through her hair. "The stars were blinking out overhead, everything was dying, the whole universe was starting to collapse—I did what I had to do, all right? The Doctor was the only person who could help!"

"You didn't have to make all of those jumps by yourself," the Doctor argued, angry that Rose would take such a horrid risk to get to him. Angry with her, and angry with himself.

"And we had the tech to travel, but it was still too primitive to accurately aim," Rose continued, ignoring him. "The whole 'Cannon' thing is a massive joke, do you know that? I mean that, the name is actually a joke, because the aim is so terrible. There was almost no way to control where I'd end up, or even when, for that matter. I had to travel in a spacesuit in case I ended up somewhere that oxygen didn't exist, or there was nothing but water or gas all round!"

Rose started pacing, her eyes darting back and forth. The Doctor's concern for her only grew. He'd never seen her like this before. He itched to give her a comforting hug, but stopped himself.

"I still have nightmares about some of those places," Rose said. "One of the universes was so small, I almost didn't have enough room to get out. My team thought I'd be trapped there. And there was one universe, I got there just in time to watch it burn. I saw the end of everything."

She grew quiet. "And so many times, I thought I was in the right place, but I wasn't, it was another wrong universe just like this one, and I'd go back empty-handed. Again. And then one time, they almost lost me in the Void…"

She shook her head, as if to rid herself of that particular memory. "And then when I finally did get to the right universe, it was still wrong." Rose put one hand over her face, pressing a thumb into her temple, as if she were warding off a stress migraine. "The Cannon got thrown off and I ended up in this weird alternate timeline, and UNIT helped me track you down, and then I finally got to you, and you'd…"

The Doctor waited, but Rose never finished that statement. He wondered what she had seen. From the pain in her eyes, he could guess that she had witnessed some pretty terrible things. He desperately hoped that none of them were things he had done.

"The point is, I didn't work so hard, for so long, just to end up with some…some…sorry, just some copy," Rose spat. "That's what you are, you're just a copy. I know that makes me sound horrible, but I went through hell just to get back to him, back to that life, and now—"

She halted, gritted her teeth, blinked back the thick tears struggling to come to the surface once again. "He just left me here, again," she said angrily. The Doctor could hear the unshed tears in her voice, strangling her. "Just made my decision for me, again, and left me here. Again. After he promised...and he didn't even say goodbye."

The Doctor didn't have any words for that. It had upset him as well, that his other self had been so cold. Though he understood—he wouldn't have taken it very well if he'd been the one watching Rose kiss someone else.

He could be thick, but even he knew he could be an ass sometimes.

Instinctively, he reached out to Rose, to comfort her, to wipe the tears away, but she pulled back. He bit the inside of his lip and swallowed his disappointment.

Rose thumbed the tears off her face, smearing some of her eye makeup on one side. "What am I supposed to do now?" she mumbled. "All that work, all that time, and he still decides what's best for me. Everything I did, it was for nothing."

"Not nothing," the Doctor said gently. "Your work helped to save billions of lives, remember? That's certainly not nothing."

"I know," Rose said. "I know. It's just…"

"You thought you'd be with him forever. And I'm not good enough," the Doctor finished, shifting uncomfortably on his perch. He was doing his best not to feel sorry for himself, but it was becoming increasingly difficult.

Rose looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's not your fault."

"Well, I guess it sort of is. You're stuck here because of me. I need someone who can stop me."

Rose nodded. "You're too unpredictable. You're willing to kill. And that's why you're not the Doctor," she said simply.

The Doctor's calm facade slipped a little at that. "Right, now that's where you're wrong," he argued. "But I supposed it can't be helped. You never knew me during the Time War."

Rose gave a start at that, but he already felt he'd said too much on the topic. He was already talking far more than he normally would allow himself. He didn't want to completely alienate her. That was bound to happen soon enough. But he couldn't seem to stop talking.

He stood up from the sofa—he needed to move.

"And you're forgetting a little incident with you, me, and a Dalek one or two regenerations ago," the Doctor told Rose, looking anywhere but her face as he walked around her living room. "I was ready to slaughter that thing. And I think my anger was rather justifiable. That monster had just murdered a building full of people. Just like the Letrion would have done, given the chance."

He turned to face her. "The only reason I didn't kill that Dalek, the only reason I didn't wipe out those parasites today, is because you convinced me not to. You," he pointed at Rose, "and Martha, and Donna, you all helped me to be better. And after you left, after you were gone, I definitely did some things I would be ashamed for you to know about. I'm not perfect, you know. I make mistakes. Huge, horrible mistakes. But that doesn't mean I'm not the Doctor."

He noticed that Rose was trembling, just slightly, her round, dark eyes opened very wide. But he knew her better than to think it was from fear. She was angry right now, very angry indeed. The Doctor backed off just a little bit.

"The other Doctor said he left you here because of me. He's afraid I'll do something bad unless you reign me in," he said. "And that's true, I probably would, in times like today. I'm not exactly a forgiving person. _No second chances_. That's one thing that hasn't changed."

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, lost in his own little world, almost talking to himself. "But that isn't the whole of it," he continued. "The other Doctor could have easily dumped me here in a strange universe, and then the two of you could have flown off, with Donna and the TARDIS, and I'd be here all alone, without anybody. Anybody at all. And he would have done it with a smile on his face. Would've said it was the best thing for everyone."

He grimaced. He really hated himself sometimes.

"But now, with all of the people I've lost, I imagine the other me won't want to travel with anyone for a while, maybe not ever, just so that he doesn't have to lose anyone else again. Because everyone leaves in the end, one way or the other."

"But at least if you kick them out, then you're the one doing the leaving, right?" Rose asked.

The Doctor swallowed the lump in his throat. He overlooked Rose's comment. He was thinking of Donna, of what was about to happen to her, if it hadn't happened already.

"So that's why he left you here," he concluded. "Not because there's something wrong with you. Because he can't bear the pain of losing anyone else ever again. He'd rather be alone."

A moment passed in silence.

Rose's trembling subsided. "Well that's stupid," she said.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She seemed like she may be waiting for him to speak, but he didn't, so she surged on ahead.

"No one else gets a say in it? No one else gets a choice?"

"No," the Doctor shook his head, not looking at her. "No one else. That's how it's always been. It's easier that way."

"Well, I'm sorry, but that's not fair."

"You say that, but you don't know what it's like," the Doctor said quietly, remembering things he never wanted to think of again. All of the companions he had lost, through death or estrangement or other terrible means. Thinking of Donna again, and Katarina, and Sara. He saw Romana's face as she perished in a stupid, pointless war. He remembered leaving Susan behind. He recalled, in vivid detail, the day he nearly lost Rose into the Void, lost her to another universe. He was surprised at how fresh that hurt was even now.

"You have no way of knowing how it feels, seeing them all come and go, knowing that they're all going to die eons before you, or possibly because of you, or they'll wise up and leave, or they'll get lost." The words ripped out before he could stop them. It made his chest hurt, or maybe that was just the one heart doing the job of two.

He shut his eyes against the memory of Rose losing her grip on that lever. "You'll just end up alone anyway, eventually. Why delay the inevitable?"

"Because it's not just about you. If you really care about someone, whether you're friends or…" Rose hesitated, "...whatever, then you've got to let them decide," she said, frowning. "You can't just decide what's best for everyone else because it's easier on you. You've got to let them have a choice too."

The Doctor bit back the temptation to reply that after nearly one thousand years of living, he felt he had a pretty keen insight on what was best for everyone.

And then it occurred to him.

"You know," he said slowly, meeting Rose's gaze, "You're right."

"Oh?" Rose asked, sarcastically surprised.

"You're right that I'm not him."

Rose's mouth fell open just a little bit. Her surprise was genuine this time.

"Because the truth is, I would have asked you want you wanted. Whether you wanted to stay with him, or with me," the Doctor continued, stowing his hands in his pockets as he approached her. "But I suppose I'm rather a selfish creature, as I'm actually happy to be stranded here with you. He may push you away, but I would choose to stay with you, Rose. If that's what you wanted. I'd ask what you wanted, and if you wanted, I'd choose to stay with you. Every time."

Rose stood speechless, her eyes wide and mouth just a bit open. She stared at him. He felt like she stared into him.

The Doctor suddenly felt very silly for talking so much. The embarrassment hit him like a flash flood as his blood thundered in his ears. He took a step back and scratched the back of his head awkwardly.

"I'm...going to go," he said, gesturing aimlessly, unable to look at Rose. "Go outside. Get some fresh air. It's very small in here."

He left Rose's cottage, Rose still standing in silence.

* * *

Rose was remembering.

_She has hugged Sarah Jane goodbye, and said farewell to Mickey, for now. His decision to stay surprises her, but she is too happy, too elated to be back on the TARDIS, to think about it that much. Besides, she is sure she will see him again later. It's a small universe, after all. She smiles at the sight of him walking away with Jack and Martha. Off to a new life, good for them._

_She's off to a new life again, herself. New-old life, really. She can hardly wait._

_She feels the familiar jolt of the TARDIS as it dematerializes. She loves that it is still familiar._

_Donna, her mother, and the new Doctor stand in a cluster on the opposite side of the console, laughing about something. Rose wonders what it could be. As if he can sense her watching him, the new Doctor glances in her direction, shoots her a broad grin. She smiles back—she can't help herself._

_Two Doctors, she thinks. How bizarre. What on earth will she do with two of them?_

_The original Doctor moves to join everyone else, but she catches his hand before he goes too far._

"_Doctor..."_

_He stops and turns. "Hm?" he asks._

_Rose feels suddenly shy. Her heart hammers in her throat and her mouth goes dry. "I just wanted to say...I've really missed you."_

_The Doctor smiles, and it's one of his lovely quiet smiles that crinkles the corners of his eyes. "Me too," he says. "It's good to see you again, Rose. Really good."_

_Rose frowns just a little bit. "Is something wrong?" she asks. "You seem a bit off."_

"_Nah, it's nothing. Just a bit tired is all."_

_She nods. "Well, you'll have to tell me all about everything from the past few years, won't you? After we've had a rest, I mean. I'm a bit knackered myself."_

"_I don't know," he says, absently pulling on one ear. "There's been quite a bit. Might take a while."_

"_What do you think we'll have to do with him?" Rose asks, nodding toward the new Doctor. "Think he'll feel left out?"_

_The Doctor looks away. "I imagine we'll have to figure something out sooner or later," he says._

"_That's all right. We've got time, haven't we?" she replies, smiling, bumping his shoulder with her own._

_The Doctor hesitates just for a millisecond. "That's right," he says. "All the time in the world."_

"_Forever this time, right?" Rose asks. The Doctor nods. _

"_Forever," he says. "I promise."_

_I promise. _

_Rose has never felt happiness quite like this before, building up and threatening to burst. She stands on her toes and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. Her heart flutters nervously the whole time, and after._

_She wonders if he feels the same way. It's impossible to tell._

_He smiles in response, but doesn't look at her._

"_All right then," he says after a moment, moving back to the console. "Time for one last trip."_

* * *

The Doctor found his way onto an old decorative bridge, a little stone thing overlooking a winding little creek on the edge of Pete's estate, and proceeded to brood. He leaned over the railing, watching the tiny rivulets fall and wend around rocks and leaves and clumps of mud, the water glittering in the starlight.

A lazy wind ruffled his hair, but he didn't notice. He was busy feeling a little silly and more than a little embarrassed about his display.

He wanted to blame Donna for his chattiness, but really, he'd always been chatty. Just not this kind of chatty. He smiled, knowing that Donna would cackle like a madwoman if she knew he and Rose had actually held something resembling a proper conversation. She'd always pushed for more details about their relationship, details he couldn't quite give her. What little part of her lingered in his subconscious was probably doing an "I told you so" dance right now.

Nosy dingbat Earth Girl. Gods, he missed her.

He sighed. He'd hoped that Rose would accept him with open arms and he'd been disappointed when she'd (understandably, he'd admit) been hurt and standoffish instead. And after years of not seeing each other, some tension was to be expected, and some serious talks were probably needed, as much as he may dread them.

The domestic approach, indeed.

Still, he hoped he hadn't chased Rose away. He had told himself to be patient, and he had failed spectacularly.

_Good job_, he told himself. _Next time, do the opposite of that_.

He was so lost in thought that he never heard anyone approaching, didn't even notice someone was nearby until a slender, warm hand found its way into his, their fingers deftly intertwining, as if their hands remembered each other exactly.

"So," Rose asked, moving in a little bit closer, leaning her head on his shoulder. "What's next?"


End file.
